INSTALLATION VIEWS
You Are From My Past Life, 2024. Inkjet transfers on MDF, recycled strip boards, oil, acrylic, papier-mâché, approx. 133 x 72 inches (338 x 183 cm). Museum of Makers Gallery, Kalm Village, Chiang Mai, Thailand, 2024.
ពីអតីតជាតិ แต่ปางก่อน
Kalm Village (Chiang Mai, Thailand)
Curated by Achariyar Rojanapirom
August 11 – November 24, 2024
(Poster) (Credits)
You Are From My Past Life locates sites of return and reincarnation: a poetic meditation on the afterlives of refugees through Buddhist ontology.
Gridded wooden structures demarcate the space, open portals, and unsettle the spatial tension between what’s “there” and what’s “not” — absence and presence, light and shadow, front and back, obstructions and passages, flatness and depth, insider and outsider. Abstracted terrain from CNC-carved plywood were derived from digital images of the former refugee camp, now Khao-I-Dang Learning Center, taken during fieldwork in 2022 (see Fig. 1) and then traced as silhouettes, and bracketed by pattern and decorative motifs from architectural ironworks.
Paper pulp on the paintings were made from beaten Khmer Times newspaper from the local market near my studio in Phnom Penh during the production of this exhibition. All materials for the installation were locally sourced in Phnom Penh and Chiang Mai, and/or up-cycled. A simulacrum of an encampment framed by dense landscapes, vernacular architecture, and fragmented timelines — this exhibition begs: “What happens when we return to the places our bodies come from?”
Across oceans and mountains, viewers are invited to (un-)map and (de-)territorialize home as a vanishing point beyond the horizon in order to constellate alternate points of return.
Text by Sopheak Sam