Festival / Biennial | Nurture Gaia 

BRIAN CURTIN DISCUSSES HIS ROLE AS ONE OF THE CURATORS OF THE BANGKOK ART BIENNALE 2024 WHICH INCLUDES THE WORK OF FOUR IRISH ARTISTS.

The fourth Bangkok Art Biennale (BAB) opened to the public on 24 October 2024 amidst a glitzy week of events, launches, and after-parties. It will run for nearly four months, closing on 25 February. This edition of BAB presents over 70 artists from around the world and is staged across 11 venues. These include the conventional Bangkok Art and Culture Centre (BACC), ancient temples, and a new development, titled One Bangkok – a residential and commercial district in the centre of the city. The digital facade of an enormous shopping centre was also put to use for artists’ films.

Ambitious, if not dizzying, in its scope and ambition, BAB speaks to many currencies. These include the artists themselves, the curatorial theme, countless numbers of public and private funders, accelerated interest in (and platforms for) contemporary art within Southeast Asia in recent years, and, ultimately, questions of ‘soft power,’ internationalism, city-branding, and the very function of global biennials across these critical interests.

My own involvement was indicative of the tensions these currencies can generate. As someone who more typically writes about art (and has reviewed past iterations for other publications), I was hesitant to accept an invitation to co-curate this year’s biennale. To do so might be to feel co-opted and therefore complicit in trying to resolve these tensions, rather than critically expose them in writing. 

Since opening, the PR for BAB regularly trumpets the thousands who’ve visited, while the opening festivities were awash with an ‘international’ crowd. The biennale has also received widespread attention in the global art press. Titled Nurture Gaia after the Gaia Hypothesis – a theory that the natural world is interrelated as a self-sustaining system – the curatorial theme emphasised the terrible damage us humans are doing. This is a fashionable lament, and because of the multiple interests at stake, it is easy to question the effective politics of such a proposition. 

But the diversity that informed or underlined the organisation of BAB was notably evident in the fact of a wide variety of art and the sharp turns in curatorial practice between, say, the integration of art with antiquities in the National Museum and the goddess-heavy presentations at the National Gallery. To wonder about the biennial format as an ideal form, one must think of something succinct, timeless, somewhat didactic and clean, and less provocatively changeable and inclusive. 

The latter is a productive means to think through the various group exhibitions and the theme itself. How else might we make connections between Kira O’Reilly’s Menopausal Gym (2021), a durational performance in which the artist puts herself through gruelling, outdoor exercises, and a nearby installation of mannequins, by a local artist, dressed in recycled plastic garb? O’Reilly’s physical contortions, with the aid of a skeletal copper structure and a variety of straps and objects, were highly expressive. Expressiveness was reinforced in view of the staid neoclassical environment of the National Gallery and because the artist sweated profusely in Bangkok’s tropical heat. Here the theme of the biennale became tangible and, perhaps oddly, was upbeat: material change, struggle, and pain in dialogue with rigour and control. The nearby commentary on eco-fashion certainly had its place but seemed benignly instructive due to being haunted by a sense of telling us what we already know.

Susan Collins and George Bolster are two artists I worked with directly, juxtaposing their engagements with landscape at the BACC. One of Collins’ projects, titled LAND (2017), comprised three large prints, digitally derived from a continuous filming of the West Bank over many months. Against Bolster’s panoramic tapestry, The Impermanence of Protection: Big Bend National Park (2023), which depicts the rural border of the US and Mexico, both stage the awe-inspiring qualities of nature, while hinting at the pernicious impact of humans. Collins’s use of pixilation spoke to the presence of surveillance, while Bolster included a video that narrates Trump’s rescinding of environmental protections. However, Bolster is proving more popular with audiences because the scale and haptic quality are seemingly delightful, offering an upbeat edge to the sinister implications. The works of both artists were surprisingly ‘activated’ in this respect, when a loud bleed from Beethoven’s Ode to Joy (1785) could be heard from the entrance, as Amanda Coogan momentarily led a signing performance with a hearing-impaired community. 

O’Reilly, Bolster, and Coogan are Irish, as is Aideen Barry who was also included – an unprecedented representation for BAB. Bolster is based in New York and O’Reilly in Finland; yet funding for their participation came from Ireland. While Barry’s dark, gothic, installation, Oblivion (2021), partly addresses Ireland’s colonial history, the work of the other three artists does not directly relate to the Irish context. Each artwork was woven into a fabric of differences that affirmed a need to make connections: between human bodies and landscapes; emotion, language, and understanding; and across the literal and affective – a binary that afflicts critical discussion of contemporary art. This insight is not to distract from very real conflicts of interest or contradictory values, but, rather, to recognise that BAB – and the biennial model more broadly – is inherently flawed. How else might we confront the messy realities of our current world and imagine different futures?

Brian Curtin is an Irish-born art critic based in Bangkok since 2000. 

brianacurtin.com