KAWITA VATANAJYANKUR
SPINNING WHEELS
28th November 2021 - 28th February 2022
Jim Thompson House Museum is pleased to announce the collaboration with Nova Contemporary to exhibit Spinning Wheel, a solo exhibition by Kawita Vatanajyankur, from 27 November 2021 – 14 February 2022. Through Spinning Wheel, Jim Thompson House Museum initiates the dialogue between the ethos of Jim Thompson and the existing social context through contemporary art. This exhibition will include selected works of Vatanajyankur that correspond to the textile industry on the second floor of Jim Thompson House Museum.
In Spinning Wheel, Kawita Vatanajyankur references the tasks undertaken by physical labourers in the textile industry. In the works, she transforms herself into a hybrid of machine and organism, like a cyborg, and puts herself through arduous positions in repetitive movements. These actions are performed through her quasi-nude form against the hyper-coloured painterly backdrops. The constant movement signifies the territories of production and reproduction in the materialistic world. It also conveys the entangled nature of existence and vulnerability of humans. Through her work, her body becomes a site of tension for the struggle for human existence. Her meditative approach performs the labourer’s hardship and yet exhibits the endurance and unwavering resilience against such. It also intricates relationships between private and public, pain and joy, mechanism and self-enlightenment, resistance and acceptance are physically inspected. The suspension and reflective redemption presented in her video aesthetic lend her work the unyielding power. Her performative condensation on the border of human and machine explores the territories of consumerism and stages the possibility of transformation in history.
Kawita Vatanajyankur’s works examine the power relations embedded in human activity and its connection to the system and ideology that human confines. Her exploration of the sphere between machine and organism creates new visual languages and dialects.
The non-white-cube environment of Jim Thompson House Museum consciously reflects her practice in materialism, labour, feminism, and the border between human and machine. After all, the ethos of Jim Thompson and Vatanajyankur’s provocation creates the explicit irony that forms the new integrity of life, vigorously and fetishistically.
