CYBER LABOUR
A Series of Live Performances and AI installations
In collaboration with Pat Pataranutaporn
Series of generative performances between the artist and her cyber selves exploring the theme of human oppression. The continuing series of work through the collaboration between the artist and technologist has a strong purpose to signify the oblivious danger of the near future in which the AI has become a detailed part of our lives; an extension of our brains that may dominate our opinions of what the essence of humanity is. The idea of Cyber-Self explores how AI could at the same time oppress and liberate humans in the technological era: as we trained machines to be more like humans, are we also unconsciously dehumanizing ourselves in order to interface with the machine?

MENTAL MACHINE: LABOR IN THE SELF ECONOMY
Live Performance, AI Installation and Video Installation
FIELD
WORK
In 'Field Work' 2020, Vatanajyankur's artistic research is explored on modern agriculture. This series showcases the visual languages for contemporary consumption and desire within a world of instant gratification while unveiling the labour behind the mass production. Within a white, laboratory-like environment, Vatanajyankur is imaging a futuristic settings of the industry of agriculture. While different types of seeds are being grown inside the large reconstructed containers, the artist's physical body is forced to transform into agricultural machineries that are made to replace human.

THE PENDULUM
5 Channels, 4K Video, 2023
PERFORMING TEXTILES
2018 - 2019
This suite of videos is Vatanajyankur's physical manifestation of manual labour processes often undertaken by women in Thailand. These actions are presented through the double-lens of a hyper-coloured formal composition and a study into the physical abilities/vulnerabilities of the body, combining as works that provoke questions of labour, consumption, feminism and the artist's lived experience.
This series is commissioned by the Dunedin Public Art Gallery, Dunedin, New Zealand.






KNIT
LIVE PERFORMANCE
Knit' is Vatanajyankur’s first live performance work. The performance component of this work is a part of her ongoing series of illuminating videos entitled ‘Performing Textiles’ which invokes a powerful sense of physicality, uncovering a world of often-invisible domestic labour by painfully testing the limits of her own body. Her dynamic video art is a springboard to explore the value and understanding of the performative body, and the role of gesture within that very performance.
As 'Performing Textiles' highlights the current world of consumption, consumerism and materialism; a world where we place higher value on objects rather than the workers and laborers behind the finished product -- the message of her work is clear. Human beings become undervalued and viewed as merely tools and even machines - that produce packages of food, clothes and other materials for us to consume. The work will bring together the ‘producer’ (the artist) and the ‘consumers’ (the audience) to present a microcosmic representation of society at large and will ask prescient questions about our complicity through inaction.
THE DYEING MACHINE


"WORK"
2015 - 2017
Vatanajyankur’s exploration of everyday and domestic work is particularly telling of her Thai homeland. A place where, for many, daily chores aren’t always assisted by electronic contraptions or white goods but are time-consuming, physically exhausting, and often the task of women. The videos’ happy, day-glow colours, dark humour and undercurrents of violence, however, bring a universality and contemporary currency to the historical trajectory of feminist art. It is telling, for instance, that she describes her performances as “meditation postures”, when such gruelling tests of resilience and fear are quite the opposite of what we might think of now as zen. But, for Vatanajyankur, extreme physical endurance offers a way to free herself from her mind: a mechanism to lose her sense of being. This deliberate objectification, she says, turns her body into sculpture.
Vertical Works
(Work Series)