The press release for Gift of Tongues, a 12 artist exhibition at the recently established Conference of Birds Gallery in Bangkok, contained a sentence I wish I had written. The sentence read “We aim to
neither validate local works through an international context, nor to build upon an established canon of contemporary Thai art”. Such a stance is, I believe, somewhat overdue for Bangkok and testament to the critical ambition of Gift of Tongues. Skirting otherwise ubiquitous concerns with identity, globalization etc. The curatorial premise of Gift of Tongues was in the proliferation of ‘voices’ that result when disparate artworks are gathered together. With no concern for grouping artists according to nationality, age, disciplinary procedure or even common interest, the curators (or curators) of Gift of Tongues were also slyly subversive of the power commonly associated with curators. This exhibition ultimately emerged as a viewer-led, rather than curator-determined, experience.


However, this experience may have been solicited by the curators as a means to displace questions about the incompetent layout of the exhibition, and the general scruffiness of the space: an incompetence and scruffiness that cannot be theorized or recuperated to ‘curatorial strategy’. The claim that Gift of Tongues offered, I quote, ‘a cabinet of curiosity with neither hierarchy nor order’ was straightforwardly redundant. What the exhibition offered was some great artworks that appeared hastily put together. Then again, if I raise a point about subverting the power of curators I guess I may have
to, well, bite my tongue on that issue. And, anyway, we essentially seek individual engagements with artworks and I don’t like being told how or what to think.


Adham Faramawy’s A31AA EL MA3- ALY was a set of compiled TV monitors with rapidly moving images of an elaborately masked figure moving or dancing to a soundtrack fuzz of whistles and interspersed
with archetypal rock star images and heavily symbolic references to ancient myth and legend. Cultic and animistic yet camp in a lurid excessiveness, Faramawy brought to mind Derek Jarman’s early super-8 movies and the influences that affected him - think of Kenneth Anger’s seminal combination of
music and image in Scorpio Rising. Faramawy, however, is very much savvy about the advent of digital technology and consequently A31AA EL MA3ALY suggested a somewhat ‘knowing’ commentary on more primitive beliefs in the power of the moving image. At its best, A31AA EL MA3ALY provoked nostalgia for times, and beliefs, less sophisticated than ours.


Tintin Cooper’s and Tuksina Pipitkul’s videos likewise manipulated received ideas and codes with varying degrees of cynicism, affection, fascination and subversion. Cooper’s layering of two different modes of representation - Hollywood’s renditions of the heroic and the visual rhetoric of slapstick - was a very humorous deconstruction of ostensibly naturalized versions of white US machismo. However, so long as Cooper remains within the realm of pop cultural representation she may be trapped by that
realm’s values: always interesting but usually without real bite. Pipitkul’s Don’t Hurt Me was a beautifully edited and very disconcerting film of a giant bear costume variously sewing, holding and tossing aside the heads of soft toy elephants (which were on display in the gallery) within a warehouse.


While other artists who have worked with soft toys (most notably Mike Kelley) tease out the ominous references to the experience of childhood, Pipitkul doesn’t allow for this distance. The soft toys appeared artist-made, consciously referential but nevertheless loaded with all those disturbing memories that can only be understood in hindsight and continue to have affect.


The more time I spent with the artworks the more I was convinced that the curators exploded, somewhat paradoxically, the implications of a curated show. The very concept of Gift of Tongues resisted measures of success: there was no means of assessing why these particular artists were chosen to support the concept. In keeping with the premise, Andrews Little’s accompanying essay brought the implications of the artworks in many directions; the metaphor of a Gift of Tongues ensured the
artworks became alienated from themselves, but to what end was unclear.


Yishay Garbasz's photographs are a case in point, but less in terms of Little’s comments (where he rightly pointed up the empathy that photography can elicit) than the convoluted, theory-infected statement that was available as a guide to Garbasz’ installation. Thankfully, this artist's work is worth much more than theories of the gaze could offer. Gibasz’s photographs capture audiences who are apparently unaware of being photographed. The result is that the seeming indifference of a pair of booted legs thrown over a cinema seat gains a significance that is anything but indifferent. Garbasz clearly has a burgeoning expertise with photography; once he falls out of love with his precedents, he may be an artist worth watching.


Garbasz leads into the overriding importance of the exhibition as a whole - namely, its youthful sophistication. Many of the artists, including Sutthirat Supaparinya and the artists group (?) Somepercentare, are clearly versed in intelligent understandings of international contemporary art
practices.


So long as these artists reckon with the ‘contemporary’ as a challenge not a given, and consequently seek to expand whatever we understand by ‘contemporary’, the exhibition Gift of Tongues will ensure its place its local histories as seminal. []