Meet Boat Sutasinee Kansomdee! Boat is one of the 5 MAHA Pavilion artists She is working with Teo Ala-Ruona for the Bangkok Biennial 2020.

Boat Sutasinee Kansomdee was born in 1987 in Chiang Mai. Now, Sutasinee lives and works in Chiang Mai.

She graduated from the Faculty of Fine Arts, Chiang Mai University in the Printmaking Division (2011) and is now studying for a Master's degree in Visual Arts at the Chiang Mai University. Her artwork ranges in many techniques including intaglio printing, industrial printing, mixed media, installation and performance art. Sutasinee is interested in recording life and emotions that occur in life in various ways by using art as an introspection tool. She is also interested in the expression of artists in public spaces, based on social and cultural criteria, and the violations of that culture and desires of society. Some parts of her life experience had an effect on her art making and became a source of “positive life” artwork projects. At present, she is interested in performance arts in relation to the line of power and the limitation of power that occurs in history of art. 

Her solo exhibitions include "Positive Life" at G Gallery, Chiang Mai (2015) and "Art8 + Positive life + Nowhere" at The Meeting Room Art Cafe, Chiang Mai (2016).​




Image credits:

• First Zoom meeting between Boat, Teo and the curator, Prima 
  

I find Trinh T. Minh-Ha’s concept of “speaking nearby” instead of “speaking for” helpful in thinking about the desire or willfulness to address a place that is not one’s origin. Rather, this desire reveals one’s own position towards the subject one is speaking about, an allyship that is described and problematized by Saidiya Hartman’s interview with Fred Wilderson in “The Position of the Unthought”. Paralleling actions in LA and Bangkok, Kim Zumpfe’s proposal seeks to reveal the difficulty of such allyship when one action can be perceived as non-compliant and threatening to a site and not, in another. “Speaking nearby” can also be the voice of the lover, recounting memories of a place to one another, as in the tone of Rachel Yezbick’s proposed correspondence between two artists. Abstracted into language, the chosen sites in their respective cities are liberated from the otherwise heavily mediatized representation in cinema.

With technological and digital means of communication, the “nearby” is no longer a question of spatial proximity. It may refer to an intimacy that exceeds physical and temporal boundaries. Whose voice are we hearing in the duet of Ana Teo Ala-Ruona’s avatar, a speaker with their pre-recorded voice and the live voice of the Bangkok-based performer’s, performing in real time?
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Linda Franke’s proposal pursues this multivocality (another Trinh T. Minh-Ha’s term) by asking for photograph submissions of useful and disused objects that would later be printed on T shirts for participants to wear. The census nature of the project draws a portrait of Bangkok’s economy through every day objects and their relationships to their users. Lastly, Suneil Sanzgiri’s undertaking of Indian diasporic identity at Wat Khaek by way of recording the temple with a LomoKino creates a double distanciation between the performer, the camera and the temple itself. The LomoKino only records images by being manually cranked. The images produced are therefore traces of the rhythms of the performer’s body instead of documentation of the temple as site.

​"Yezbick explores body politics and contested sites of representation through an intimate collaborative performance with a Bangkok-based artist. For this work, the artists lend their bodies and sight to one another as proxies to explore each other’s respective cities, Bangkok and Los Angeles. They will engage with one another’s worlds via dialogue, distant tours, letters and personal memories of place.
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To contest highly mythologized and romanticized notions of these two cities, perpetuated by the film industry, the artists examine their own experiences to place, excavating the violence and vulnerability of the cities’ inhabitants that is often hidden from view. The work will layer the two sites on top of one another, uncovering the symbolic space between the locations.

The project occupies contested spaces in an effort to understand how we desire and yearn for places that have been fabricated from legacies of violence. By inviting comparisons between location and the artists themselves, this work asks us to reconsider the place and production of contested knowledge, as perceptions that permeate both place and person, the material and immaterial."

- Ryat Yezbick

"I am interested in using performance to non-normatively occupy normative social situations. I’ve never traced Wilde’s uselessness of art to the queer habit of the non-normative but, here in our conversation, I wonder if they might have a relationship.” – Sharon Hayes

In “Love Address”, Sharon publicly shares a love address to an unknown lover. The address is really to the Iraq war and the ways in which private and political selves get bound together. Sharon’s work addresses the authenticity of words when you are repeating the words of another.

“Using written speculative fiction, somato-fictional exercises and technology as mediums to imagine closeness and intimacy across distance, this work presents a fantasy in which the performer is welcoming another being to co-inhabit their body in a mutualistic and parasitic way, for the time of the performance.

Prior to the performance the two performers will do long-distance speculative embodied exercises together in order to reach out to one another through their imagination. These exercises stem from an exercise called "Mycelium of Nerves", created by Ala-Ruona's colleague, artist Outi Condit.

The performer speaks a duet with a loudspeaker. Together they form a techno-imaginary-symbiotic-cyborg by speaking in unison: the performer is the host and the loudspeaker’s sound is the parasite that visits the site of the performance through the performer’s body.”

- Teo Ala-Ruona