A Non-Biennale Biennale Vipash Purichanont
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 has been four years since the biennale boom between 2017 and 2018, one cannot 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.1 In the article, he
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