Patrik Proško

The benefit exhibition Intermundium was held under the auspices and with the financial support of the Embassy of the Czech Republic in Bangkok, represented by Ambassador Marek Libřický, and in cooperation with the Bangkok Art and Culture Centre. The proceeds went toward material aid for poor people and for children injured by unexploded ordnance in Laos. Some of the pictures were donated to the Mittaphab Hospital in Vientiane, which was built and equipped with state-of-the-art technology by Czech companies. The exhibition presented twenty large-format prints of site-specific interventions from Europe and beyond, including all the projects realized across Asia during my expedition Journey to Artasia, over which the embassy also took patronage. Two installations in front of the gallery entrance accompanied the exhibition and became part of Thailand’s first international art biennale, titled “Beyond Bliss”. The first, called “Intermundium”, stood before the main entrance. Intermundium — the space between worlds — an object made of iron crowd barriers tied with ropes into a shape of chaotic order, standing inside a clearly demarcated space in which the object is protected by the same barriers it is made of. The ropes holding its shape together have loose ends reaching beyond the boundary of that space, and anyone can tie onto those ends and change where they lead. These rules can also be destroyed by force, or eliminated by slow unravelling — the same way they were created. A mountain of complicated, inaccessible obstacles, standing on a flimsy structure. The second was an intervention into the statue of Nang Phisuea Samut by the gallery’s side entrance. Nang Phisuea Samut is the traditional man-eating giantess of the Thai national fantasy epic Phra Aphai Mani, written by the poet Sunthorn Phu. It is the longest poetic epic ever written in the Thai language — 48,686 couplets that took Sunthorn Phu twenty-two years to write, from 1822 to 1844. It was written during the Western colonization of Southeast Asia, and some critics believe Sunthorn Phu conceived the poem as an anti-colonial story disguised as a fairy-tale fantasy adventure. The epic became part of national folklore and has been adapted for theatre, film and comics. Her statue in front of the gallery is built so that people can have their picture taken sitting in her hand. I used the ornamental language of the Czech tradition of decorating Christmas gingerbread, turning the man-eater into a dessert that people can eat — connecting European and Asian traditions in the process, the past ones and perhaps the present ones too. A Thai giantess with a Christmas star on her forehead. Asia is undergoing what might be called a digitalization of the bioform: even in galleries, people come mainly to take selfies. The selfie takes precedence over the works on display, which become mere backdrop and decoration for the photographed visitor, rather than something to be curious about. It is a huge phenomenon — so I made an imitation phone for her free hand, so that the giantess appears to be taking a selfie with her new artistic decoration.