Loredana Pazzini - Paracciani
Loredana Pazzini-Paracciani is an independent scholar and curator of Southeast Asian contemporary art. Her research and curatorial practice revolve around critical sociopolitical issues in Southeast Asia, advocating a counter-hegemonic and non-Western-centric discourse. She curated Diaspora: Exit, Exile, Exodus of Southeast Asia (2019) at MAIIAM Contemporary Art Museum, Thailand; and Architectural Landscapes: SEA in the Forefront (2015) at Queens Museum, New York, along with several exhibitions for commercial galleries in the US, UK, and Southeast Asia. Her published academic research are included in Frames Cinema Journal, University of St Andrews, UK; Convocarte: Revista de Ciências da Arte, Lisbon University, Portugal; and M.A.tter Unbound, LASALLE College of the Arts, Singapore, among others. She is a member of the Association for Southeast Asian Studies in UK, and Research Network for Transcultural Practices in the Arts and Humanities, Berlin University. Together with Patrick D. Flores, Loredana co-edited the anthology Interlaced Journeys: Diaspora and the Contemporary in Southeast Asian Art, published in 2020 by Osage Art Foundation, Hong Kong.Loredana is based between London, UK, and Bangkok, Thailand.
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Papers by Loredana Pazzini - Paracciani
Worm. Can these words be truly immortal? Can we be immortal?
The question is redundant – we cannot be immortal – but perhaps our shared experiences, cultural legacy and biological matter can. This is Boedi Widjaja’s proposition through his work and practice. And this is the proposition, also, of this essay: to explore the poetics of immortality as a concept and as an object.
This 2018 updated revision will be included in the upcomingpublication of the 2016 show.
With the gravitas of an alchemist, Kunakornwong transforms, distilling through the artistic narrative of this new body of work, the dust of our own bodies and of the gallery space that surrounds us into crystallized images that evoke a sense of suspended stillness.
Contributors Loredana Paracciani, Lucia Cordeschi, Kong Yen Lin, Rosalie Kwok, Elaine Chiew, Usha Das
Worm. Can these words be truly immortal? Can we be immortal?
The question is redundant – we cannot be immortal – but perhaps our shared experiences, cultural legacy and biological matter can. This is Boedi Widjaja’s proposition through his work and practice. And this is the proposition, also, of this essay: to explore the poetics of immortality as a concept and as an object.
This 2018 updated revision will be included in the upcomingpublication of the 2016 show.
With the gravitas of an alchemist, Kunakornwong transforms, distilling through the artistic narrative of this new body of work, the dust of our own bodies and of the gallery space that surrounds us into crystallized images that evoke a sense of suspended stillness.
Contributors Loredana Paracciani, Lucia Cordeschi, Kong Yen Lin, Rosalie Kwok, Elaine Chiew, Usha Das
In that, Under the Dark Sun is also a prophecy.
(The question of the subject)
What is a subjective body? What is inside the body? What is outside the body? From academic studies to literature and visual art, these questions persist, despite having been extensively discussed. Since the 1970s and 80s, the body has become the cornerstone of theoretical methodology, seeking a wider definition of the body. The notion of body objectification, especially of the feminine body, is vastly discussed in gender studies and widely ventured on by current art practitioners. Personally, I have often come across this object/subject binary in my curatorial research, and in many ways this same binary has prompted my interest for the exhibition Body, Community, and Society: She is House, to investigate the body as subjectthrough its multiple interpretations—both physical and architectural, as form and habitat—in relation to specific cultures and traditions in Indonesia, in places of significance to the featured artists, who are the focus of this essay.
Building on ongoing considerations on the entanglement of ethnography and Southeast Asia, with specific reference to art history, I examine in this paper, cinematic Southeast Asian practices to understand if they responds to the same ethnographic need of assimilation of the local and its ‘dislocation’ of the present. To do so, I focus on a specific country, Thailand, through the works of cinematographer and documentarist Nontawat Numbenchapol. Since 2013, Numbenchapol has been working at the border between Thailand and its neighboring countries Cambodia and Myanmar, observing first-hand the lives of individuals and communities, not unlike the practice of an ethnographer. Through a close analysis of his work, my objective is to highlight how his cinematic practice often overlaps with that of the visual ethnographers, and, specifically, how his recent work "The longest way round is the shortest way home" impels the ethnographic approach.
painting, sculpture, collage and works on paper, the artists explore themes of duality and alternative possibilities from both personal and collective narratives.
As a whole the 24-screen ensemble titled The Game, and part of the mixed-media exhibition The Game | Viet Nam by LE Brothers, tells a story of two men, the artists LE Brothers themselves, and of the Vietnamese people with whom they share a common, troubled past. It is through acute awareness and subtle observation of this past that LE Brothers have been able to weave their personal stories with the grand narrative of their country, Vietnam.
REV | ACTION: Contemporary Art from Southeast Asia is driven by a similarly rooted interest in history and its recurrent negotiations. At the same time, the exhibition title alludes to the sense of sharp acceleration, or revving up, with which artists from Southeast Asia are re-examining their recent histories, with a fuller and deeper engagement.
While the physical transformation was envisioned in the convergence of the elements, the metaphysical dimension of this transformation was left to the alchemy of materials. The ‘coagula’ or fusion—the act of merging and transforming metals to a greater source of energy—acknowledges in Futurist manifestos the role of alchemy as a spiritual force within new artistic and cultural endeavors. Alloyed with technical advancement, Futurism praised the formation of a new society where mechanical bodies functioned as non-human species. Alienation, rupture and disjunction were integrated elements of the new world.
New Energetics: Inverting the Process by Ruben Pang (b. 1990) draws its conceptual framework from the Futurist’s vision of a new, regenerated world—a world made of light and form that is the ultimate synthesis of cosmic energy. In this latest series of works, however, Pang pushes further the alchemical relation to the artwork by inverting the technical gravity typical of the Futurists to allow chemical and accidental fluidity in his practice.
While broadly framing Thai art practice in the light of the cultural, social and economic changes that have occurred in recent history - from the tumultuous years of the 1970s, the rise of neo-traditional and nationalist art in the 80s, to the socially engaged art of the 90s - the language adopted in the last decade by the young art practitioners seems to be often moving away or reinterpreting the lesson of the senior generation of the 60s.
Thus , in a country with a long history of artistic practice but with a written art history still nascent, it is all the more relevant to understand the weight of such generational shifts onto the local art practice in order to provide an historical and social framework to the unfolding contemporary trends.
The question arises: Are we really aware of what we do and why we do it?
Artist Michael Shaowanasai is. And so is his new body of visual art I am made 4 SIN conceived as the artist’s reinterpretation of personal and collective beliefs. These beliefs are playfully shuffled and repositioned by Shaowanasai to entice the Other into a challenging exchange of ideas and towards freedom of “wearable” expression.
However, if history is for many Thai contemporary artists the cohesive magnet from which to approach social, cultural and political implications, emerging artists of the twenty-first century are generally disillusioned by the activist quality given to the art of their senior generation, in turn portraying historical memories and the general apathy of Thai citizens through the layering of their works with allegories and conceptual metaphors.
Can You Hear Me? group video exhibition responds to this artistic shift by featuring the works of six young and established Thai artists in the midst of their careers. The works are either recently produced or the result of past efforts in response to particular social and political events that have shaken Thailand at different times, though often erased from social memory. Hence the title given to this exhibition serves as a reminder and provocation: Has anybody heard so far? Can we now hear what the artists have to say as witnesses and products of their own contemporary society?
Scholarly focus on contemporary Thai art, in English, is relatively recent and mostly conducted within a regional framework whereby Thai art is approached as part of the wider Southeast Asia.
This thesis extends the study of Thai art towards local investigation, that is, to focus on the education background of young and emerging Thai artists in order to examine two critical links: first, the link between art education and emerging art practitioners; second, the link between contemporary art practice and common themes and methodologies fostered among young artists.