Rupture – Cause and Effect

– CAUSE AND EFFECT A photographic exhibition curated by Olivier Pin-Fat

PRESS RELEASE : FOR IMMDIATE RELEASE

หมายเหตุ พฤษภา นิทรรศการภาพถ่าย บันทึกความทรงจำต่อเหตุการณ์ 19 พฤษภาคม 2553โดย 5 ช่างภาพ 5 มุมมองอันหลากหลากทั้งไทยและต่างประเทศคัดสรรผลงานโดย ออลิวิเอร์ ผิน-แฟ็ท ขณะที่สถานการณ์ความขัดแย้งทางการเมืองยังไม่มีทีท่าจะสงบลงง่ายๆ การสมานฉันท์และการปรองดองยังคงต้องใช้เวลา การกลับไปดูภาพเหตุการณ์ความรุนแรงครั้งประวัติศาสตร์การเมืองไทยของวันที่ 19 พฤษภาคม ที่ผ่านมาอีกครั้งหนึ่ง อาจช่วยให้สังคมไทยได้สติ ได้คิดมากขึ้น ‘หมายเหตุ พฤษภา’ เป็นนิทรรศการภาพถ่ายของ 5 ช่างภาพ 5 มุมมอง ทั้งไทยและต่างประเทศ ที่มีต่อเหตุการณ์ความรุนแรงดังกล่าว ผลงานกว่า 100 ชิ้น ถูกบันทึกขึ้นทั้งก่อน – ขณะเกิดขึ้น – และหลังเหตุการณ์ความวุ่นวาย ด้วยแง่มุมมองชวนขบคิดอันแตกไปจากภาพข่าวสื่อรายวันที่นำเสนอมาก่อนหน้านี้ โดยปราศจากอคติ ข้อเรียกร้อง และเล่ห์กลการเมืองแอบแฝง นิทรรศการ ‘หมายเหตุ พฤษภา’ จัดแสดงตั้งแต่วันที่ 25 พฤศจิกายน 2553 ถึง 9 มกราคม 2554 ณ ห้องนิทรรศการชั้น 9 สนใจข้อมูลเพิ่มเติมโปรดติดต่อ ฝ่ายนิทรรศการ หอศิลปวัฒนธรรมแห่งกรุงเทพมหานคร 02 214 6630-9 -- ศิลปิน- มานิต ศรีวานิชภูมิ[ไทย] 18 Prints (225 ซม x 160 ซม)- ปิยทัต เหมทัต [ไทย] 30 Prints (85 ซม x 60 ซม)- ออลิวิเอร์ ผิน-แฟ็ท 08 Prints (225 ซม x 160 ซม)- อันเยส เดร์เบยส์ [ฝรั่งเศส] 12 prints (160 ซม x 160 ซม and 225 ซม x 160 ซม)- วูฟกัง เบลล์วินเคล [เยอรมัน] 31 Prints (85 ซม x 60 ซม) -- A photographic exhibition curated by Olivier Pin-FatTo be shown at the Bangkok Art and Culture Centre will be a unique exhibition of five international photographic artists who in varying yet very distinctive ways, explore photographically the recent political crisis that blistered and then erupted in Bangkok. All five visions when installed together will provide the viewer with a jarred, broken and potently visionary, visceral experience.

The diversity of the artists is a key component to the impact of ‘Rupture – Cause & Effect’, photographically each one hits an alternative nuance, an incisive & personal resonance, that is not currently represented. The mainstream media’s portrayal and dissemination of recent events have already sunk like a stone into the collective consciousness. ‘Rupture’ presents an original and alternative vision to this, a multi-dimensional expression of these fractured and troubled times. It asks more questions than it answers. It invites thought and reflection.


The artists come from Thailand, Germany, France and Great Britain. -- The Photographers: - Wolfgang Bellwinkel – 18 Prints (225 CMs x 160 CMs) - Agnes Dherbeys – 30 Prints (85 CMs x 60 CMs) - Piyatat Hemmatat – 08 Prints (225 CMs x 160 CMs) - Manit Sriwanichpoom – 12 prints (160 Cms x 160 CMs and 225 CMs x 160 CMs) - Olivier Pin-Fat – 31 Prints (85 CMs x 60 CMs) Manit SriwanichpoomManit Sriwanichpoom is one of Thailand’s leading photographers, and certainly its best known in the international art world, having exhibited worldwide at events such as the Venice Biennale, Photo España, Bienal de São Paulo, International Photography Biennale (Mexico), Pingyao International Phtography Festival (China), Gwangju Biennale (Korea), and at the Hayward Gallery and the Photographer’s Gallery, (both in the UK). His works are held by the Maison Européenne de la Photographie (Paris), the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, the Singapore Art Museum, the Queensland Art Gallery, H+F Foundation, and well-known private collectors. In 2007 he was awarded Japan's prestigious Higashikawa Overseas Photographer Prize. Wolfgang BellwinkelWolfgang Bellwinkel is an award winning German photographer and filmmaker based between Berlin and Bangkok. He has been a visiting a lecturer at NgeeAnn Polytechnic (Singapore, 2000/01), Silapakorn University (Bangkok, 2006), Muthesius Hochschule, Kiel (2006), & Chulalongkorn University (Bangkok, 2007). In 1994, his monograph ‘BOSNIA’ was published to critical acclaim, and in 2006 he released his first film ‘WEG.’ He is represented by the prestigious Cologne based agency, Laif. Agnes DherbeysAgnes Dherbeys is an award winning French photojournalist. Her work has been exhibited at Visa pour l'Image in France 2007 and in FotoFreo, Western Australia, in April 2008 and March 2010. In 2007, she won the Second Prize in the Spot News story category in the prestigious World Press Photo contest, and was a participant in the Joop Swart Masterclass 2008, in Amsterdam. Dherbeys' work has been published in Newsweek, Time, The New York Times, The Sunday Times Magazine, Le Monde 2, Libération, Marie Claire, GQ FRANCE among others. She is based in Bangkok. Piyatat HemmatatPiyatat Hemmatat has received enthusiastic responses from viewers and patrons of the arts who acquire his works for their private collections. Art galleries exhibiting his works include the Linhof Gallery, Apart Gallery, Twist Art Gallery, Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art and Midland Art Center. His works have been published in local and international media, such as The New York Times Magazine, The Guardian: London, The Daily Telegraph: London – to mention a few. He recently established RMA Institute in Bangkok, a public space for creative discovery and artistic experiments/theories. Olivier Pin-FatOlivier Pin-Fat is an award winning Sino-British photographer who has been based in Bangkok for the


past 17 years. From 1998 – 2008 he was a member of the avant-garde agency VU and Gallery VU, in Paris. He exhibits frequently in Europe and Asia, and in May 2009, his monograph ‘Dead Light, Bone Dry’ was shortlisted for ‘The European Publishers Award for Photography’. It will be published in 2011

Wolfgang Bellwinkel continues his ongoing series on ‘the metropolis’, a city in flux, a cacophony of scrambled visual over load – all expressed beneath the advertising tag-line - that delves into the very heart of rapid change, rapid decay and human isolation amidst both these bewildering dreams and sobering nightmares. In this sense he provides a powerful and multi-layered ‘context’ that goes beyond historical documentation. Whilst viewing his 18 enormous prints, we find ourselves literally getting lost in detail, everything is sharp, every minute element as important as the other. When we pull away to try and make sense of this ‘context’, we realize the images are rupturing, if not literally burning, the metropolis he has depicted is certainly smoldering. It’s an apocalyptic vision that gives no precedence to one thing over another. All is important.


Agnes Dherbeys, who has been photographing the ongoing political crisis in Thailand since 2006, shows not only her commitment and sense of responsibility to ‘the story’ (in an historical, socio-political and journalistic sense), but through this series, expresses an agonizing sense of immediacy, bloody rawness and an overwhelming sense of urgency. Her images are not only historical documents of great importance, but when viewing her installation, we also find ourselves claustrophobically and maddeningly entangled in the violent and bleeding chaos of this ‘story line’, and what we find is there is no escape from it.


Piyatat Hemmatat takes a visual step to the side and focuses intensely on an aspect of the crisis, a potent and resonant metaphor – his own. By photographing in stark black and white, he pictures solely bullet-busted logos. Gucci, Prada, Dior, Celine, and so on - these opulent fonts of consumerism – these logos of almost unreachable and impossibly distant and other-worldly material aspirations (to most in Thailand, and beyond). In his images these dreams of rabid consumption and material luxury have been cracked, bullet hole ridden, shattered into shards. Globalization as a reality and force, has been smashed by ‘internal affairs’. It’s a powerful and direct message that seems to emphasise how broken things really are a millimeter beneath the surface.


Manit Sriwanichpoom, famed for his ‘pink man’ series, with typical sardonic humour expresses with two formats (small and square) a monochromatic ‘killing joke’. Manit takes not one step back, but two. He turns his focus on crowds of Bangkok residents, photographing the still smoking wreckage of Central World, one of Bangkok’s largest shopping centers that was burnt down in the wake of the Red Shirts violent dispersal. People in his images are standing, disconnected from one another, isolated within their own spaces, in over exposed sunlight. Standing in this atomic light as if in a trance state, they all hold cameras, or mobile telephones, taking snap shots of the destroyed shopping center. They appear as if they’re watching and witnessing the landing of a U.F.O. It is a potent triple-take on the crisis which is simultaneously very much a part of his ongoing work about Consumerism’s vaporous dreams. A sense of shock and numbness, exposure and vulnerability seems to emanate from these crowds of onlookers. The images are not without compassion. Interspersed with these people, are sculptural still-lifes of the year before, photographic details from a burnt bus, that could have been photographed in May 2010.


Olivier Pin-Fat, on the other hand, who photographed during the course of only one day (Friday 21st May), explores, almost forensically - but without sentimentality - what seems to be a silently shocked, bloodied, hauntingly abandoned and burnt, deserted city. Schizophrenically alternating between monochrome and colour, Pin-Fat shows human presence is in the twisted stains, the liquid residue, the concrete scars and visual constructs he photographs. Events are hinted at, emotively, but not explicitly expressed. The context is dormant but loudly present throughout his semi-abstract installation. It seems to meander in different directions. There’s no stance or position adopted. He depicts a ghostly sense of ‘aftermath’, one filled with frightening foreboding and shocking disbelief.


Documents

Rupture – Cause and Effect