My Own Words: A Non-Biennale Biennale

Reflecting on Thailand Biennale Korat 2021
By Vipash Purichanont

'My Own Words' is a monthly series which features personal essays by practitioners in the Southeast Asian art community. They deliberate on their locality's present circumstances, articulating observations and challenges in their respective roles.

It is unusual for an independent curator to return to a biennale. But I was invited to co-curate the second edition of Thailand Biennale after working as an assistant curator for the first edition in Krabi in 2018. I met with Yuko Hasegawa, the artistic director of Thailand Biennale, Korat 2021, and my co-curator Seiha Kurosawa in Nakhon Ratchasima Province in February 2019. We were not aware of how the COVID-19 pandemic would affect our work, and that would be the last time that we were physically together as a team prior to installing the show in November 2021. This essay reflects on the repetitive tasks in biennale-making, which made me question what it means to make one altogether, especially in times of hardship.

As a nomadic biennale, Thailand Biennale moves from one province to another in each edition. It is commissioned and organised by the Office of Contemporary Art and Culture (OCAC), Ministry of Culture, alongside the governmental body of the selected province. From an operational perspective, it means that for every biennale there are new exhibition sites to survey, new content to research, new relationships to establish, and new permissions to request. The curator’s to-do list is endless. 

There is a sense of uncanniness in repeating the same conversations whenever I work with new people in new locations. Even though it is four years since the biennale boom in 2017 and 2018, one can not act as if everyone in the country knows what a biennale is. I have also noticed every stakeholder had different expectations from the biennale. In this chaos, Lee Weng Choy’s article titled ‘Biennale Demand’ has been a helpful companion. In the article, he laid out four components: institutional demand, local demand, the art world’s demand, and the biennale’s own demand. Though they may manifest differently in each biennale, Lee’s model remains useful in understanding what different stakeholders want from the biennale.

A screenshot from a promotion video of the biennale by OTOP TODAY KORAT, ‘เชิญเที่ยวงานมหกรรมศิลปนานาชาติ Thailand Biennale Korat 2021’. Accessed from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UWd-4o81BCM.

For institutions, there is always an internal contradiction in the urge to be international and national at the same time. Nonetheless, the most crucial drawback is the understanding of contemporary art itself. Two months before the biennale opened to the public, the Korat government launched a promotion video with Krit Ngarmsom’s ‘Queen Cat’, a permanent public commission as its centrepiece. However, it presented the artwork as a perfect background for taking selfies and group photos. The civil offices even invented a new ritual, inviting the audience to walk under the belly of the sculpture for good fortune. 

In Khonkaen, a provincial government sector established ‘Mudmee Biennale’ as an exhibition of local silk products at a university’s convention hall. This evinced the lack of understanding of what a biennale entails. It also showed the organiser’s expectation of a biennale as a festival of spectacle, not a space for artistic creation and education. 

Promotion image for Mudmee Biennale 2021: Craft the World. Published on Mudmee Biennale’s Facebook page on 14 September 2021. Accessed from: https://www.facebook.com/718231875637745/photos/a.766529027474696/766529000808032/

Speaking to the idea of local demand in putting together Thailand Biennale Korat,  the notion of selection and curation was not welcomed in the art community. Instead, in order to meet the pressure of local artists, the provincial government ran separate collateral events and organised a series of group exhibitions in the shopping malls and at the city centre. The OCAC also organised an independent international pavilion at the palace. 

The demands of the art world are what we are most familiar with. This has to do with the number and calibre of participating artists, the variety of artistic practices and so on. Indeed, these international demands were the dominant force in shaping this biennale under Hasegawa’s supervision.

“As the pandemic dragged on, the question became about how to respond to the new emergencies, instead of struggling to maintain the international gold standard of biennale-making. Is the pandemic also a call for reconfiguration?”

Lastly but not least, there are the biennale’s own demands and aspirations. Although Lee’s essay focused on the time and attention that the biennale asks from audiences and critics.This is different from the perspective of a curator. More than time and attention, it essentially demands a level of organisation  among curators, artists and the team of project managers, coordinators, fabricators. As the pandemic dragged on, the question became about how to respond to the new emergencies, instead of struggling to maintain the international gold standard of biennale-making. Is the pandemic also a call for reconfiguration?

In sum, there were perhaps multiple biennales in Korat. While there was the official Thailand Biennale, there were also inseparable “non-biennales” that came along with it. The latter were a result of a deafness to the different demands (or a refusal to listen in the first place). Also, there might be a different cry from biennales during this time of hardship that we were too busy to stop and listen, because we needed to serve other agendas. Nonetheless, it made me wonder about the creation of a non-biennale biennale, the one which may coexist with the multitudes, being a point of gathering rather than a centralised space of authority. The one which also continues to evolve as a biennale. The next edition of Thailand Biennale is due to be in Chiangrai in 2023. Despite the noise, I hope that all voices can be heard.

The views and opinions expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect those of A&M.

This essay was first published in CHECK-IN 2022, A&M’s second annual publication. Click here to read the digital copy in full, or to purchase a copy of the limited print edition.

Read all My Own Words essays here.