everyday TAPAS everyday
November 26th, 2019A variety of tasty bites inspired by small plates of Europe. Cured olives, aged Manchego cheese, chorizo sausage, Mortadella and olive cream Bocadillo!
All posts by cw
Olá – A Rugs exhibition by GUR
November 26th, 2019 28 November 2019 – 12 January 2020
Opening reception: Thursday 28 November 2019, 19.00h
The Embassy of Portugal in Thailand, the Portuguese Cultural Center – Instituto Camões in Bangkok in partnership with WTF Gallery are delighted to invite you to A Rugs Exhibition “Olá“ by GUR at WTF Gallery. The opening reception will be held on Thursday 28 November 2019, 7pm at WTF Gallery.
"Olá" is hello in Portuguese.
“Olá” is also the title for an exhibition where Célia Esteves from GUR, and Somrak Sila from WTF Bangkok Gallery, conjoined ideas to show all the Portuguese collaborations made in the pass and new GURs with Thailand’s artists challenging themselves into the rough but still delicate rag rugs technique from the Portuguese handcrafts.
The exhibition aims to promote an expressive relationship between the hand drawing and the hand loom, the free approach to the paper against the limitations process and material of the handloom. The original art converted to the limitations of the handloom are translated into simple designs, like dots or pixels, enhancing multiple possibilities from the free hand drawings.
Still full of possibilities “Olá” is the presentation of those results and how the translation of complex designs can be converted by this medium.
Within the rugs the exhibition will also present original art work from the 4 Thai/Thailand based artists including Lee Anantawat, Marc Stuart, Parvit Tae Pichienrangsan and Saran Yen Panya as well as 20 Portuguese design rugs.
About Célia Esteves & GUR
Célia is form Viana do Castelo, a small town in the north of Portugal that is very rich in traditional handcraft. Célia always remember having hand woven rugs in her house and in their friends and family’s homes too. They are very typical in Portugal and they have always been more or less the same; beautiful in their own way but very simple, using randomly chosen recycled materials form textile factories.
After some years working at an artist’s print studio in Porto, Célia was invited to an exhibition in her hometown, where the intention was to make a bridge between artisans of traditional handcrafts and young designers. It was here that she worked on a design for the handloom with the weaver Cláudia Vilas Boas and they made the first GUR. Célia was so happy with the result and found it so exciting that she wanted to share the experience. She asked some of her illustrator friends to design on too, and GUR started.
The essence of GUR is making these typical Portuguese rugs more fun. We use the same technique with carefully select materials. The rugs are very authentic to what they have always been but now they involve a design factor working with artists and illustrators, translating their ideas into rugs.
Visitor information
WTF Café & Gallery
7 Sukhumvit Soi 51, Wattana, Klongton-Nua, Bangkok 10110
https://www.facebook.com/WTFGalleryandCafe/www.rugbygur.com
BTS: Thonglor Opening times: Tuesday – Sunday, 4-10pm
Free Admission
For further information please contact:
Somrak Sila, Christopher Wise
Tel: +66 (0)2 662 6246, +66 (0)89 926 5474, +66 (0)89 926 5159
Rohini Devasher & Sung Tieu: The Ghost War
September 19th, 201925 September – 23 October 2019
Curator: Abhijan Toto
Opening Reception: Wednesday 25 September 2019, 7pm
The Ghost War brings together video, print and sound works by Rohini Devasher and Sung Tieu. How have the infrastructures of war in the 20th Century produced the contours of the worlds we inhabit today? And how do these layered histories of war continue to haunt geographies and landscapes? The show engages with the particular position of Thailand in Southeast Asia, particularly during the Cold War, and the pivotal role it played during the American War in Vietnam.
Vietnamese-German artist Sung Tieu’s work unpacks often-ignored histories of the War in Vietnam, layering personal narratives, archival material and poetic interjections. In ‘The Ghost War’, she engages with the history of the PSYOPS’s ‘Operation Wandering Ghost’, where sound was used as a tool of warfare against the Viet Cong. The CIA, who used the Ramasum Complex in Udon Thani as their base, developed a haunting soundtrack which was blasted into the forest by US soldiers in an attempt to force the Viet Cong to surrender. Through sound and video installation, Sung Tieu appropriates this form, and attempts to unpack the capacity of sound to alter and to haunt landscape, and the long-term effects of war on communities.
Speculating further on this relationship between landscapes and war is the Rohini Devasher. Devasher’s practice looks into the construction of scientific discourses, often focusing on Deep Time and the climactic. In this exhibition, she presents a work of speculative fiction entitled ‘Shivering Sands’, and an associated series of prints. Beginning from the ruins of sea forts off the coast of the UK built during WW II, Devasher uses this peculiar geography to unpack the layers of time haunting these strange ruins. She intersperses the video with a text by Laura Raicovich on the land artist Walter de Maria’s ‘Lightning Fields’, poetically weaving the two contexts together, and imaging a larger history of the masculinist reshapings of landscapes, and their long durée effects.
The Ghost War invites the viewer to re-imagine the frameworks through which we have hitherto understood the histories of war in the region, unpacking specific histories, and their latent effects, and through this, to begin to imagine their relationship to cosmic and to other scales of history.
Sung Tieu, born 1987 in Hai Duong, Vietnam is an artist based between Berlin and London. Her artistic practice spans installations, performances and public interventions. Forthcoming institutional solo exhibitions include Haus der Kunst and Nottingham Contemporary (both 2020), forthcoming group exhibitions include the David Roberts Foundation (2019) and Prague Biennale (2020), forthcoming performances include Tate Modern. She is part of several art collectives, among them TROI OI, Asia Art Activism, The Forest Curriculum and East London Cable.
Rohini Devasher works in a variety of media, including sound, video, prints, and large site-specific drawing. Her current body of work is a collection of “strange” terrains, constructed by observing, recording, fictionalizing, and reimagining objects and spaces that exist at the interface between science, nature, culture, perception, and production. Her work has been shown at the 7th Moscow Biennale; Spencer Museum of Art, Lawrence, Kansas; Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology, Lisbon; ZKM Karlsruhe; and Singapore ArtScience Museum, among others. She has had solo exhibitions at the Dr Bhau Daji Lad Mumbai City Museum and vis à vis Experience Centre, New Delhi. She has been an artist-in-residence at the Spencer Museum of Art, Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, and Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin.
WTF Café & Gallery
7 Sukhumvit Soi 51, Wattana, Klongton-Nua, Bangkok 10110
www.wtfbangkok.com
BTS: Thonglor Opening times: Tuesday – Sunday, 4-10pm
Free Admission
For further information please contact:
Somrak Sila, Christopher Wise
Tel: +66 (0)2 662 6246, +66 (0)89 926 5474, +66 (0)89 926 5159
Email: somrak@wtfbangkok.com, cw@wtfbangkok.co
Christopher Wise: Affliction
July 10th, 201919 July – 18 August 2019
Opening Reception: Friday19 July 2019, 7pm
“O what has come over us? Where are the violent fates pushing us back to? I see passing by, in headlong flight, time which makes the world a fleeting place. There seems to be no defense and no understanding of the cause of the afflictions. Was it the operation of the heavenly bodies or of our own iniquitous doings, being sent down upon mankind for our correction by the wrath of an almighty power? Our distraction by entertainments and devices, ignorant of seeing the almighty in the infinitesimal. We are absorbed in pleasure with song and revel, sparing to satisfy no appetite, and to laugh and mock at no event. A plague of ecstatic despair echoes throughout the East and West, persons are distraught and almost without feeling. Little by little, from town to town, from village to village, from house to house, and finally from person to person the connective tissue of the affliction-ridden society has come undone and in its place a cruel, surreal rapport. The afflictions have made us more avaricious and grasping, even though we have far greater possessions. More covetous and disturbed by each other more frequently with suits, brawls, disputes, and pleas.
As we recognize our own afflictions, not to speak of many others of a similar or even graver complexion, diverse apprehensions and imaginations we view each other with harsh resolution, to shun and abhor all contact with the sick thinking, thereby to make our own health secure. Sound judgment, perhaps, as it affirmed that there was no medicine for the affliction superior or equal in efficacy to flight. But to where? Our need to have the freedom sufficient to satisfy our appetites not as recluses, but free to enviously regard those things particularly to our taste or liking.
Lamenting our misery, we fear to remain, yet dare not flee.”
As we recognize our own afflictions, not to speak of many others of a similar or even graver complexion, diverse apprehensions and imaginations we view each other with harsh resolution, to shun and abhor all contact with the sick thinking, thereby to make our own health secure. Sound judgment, perhaps, as it affirmed that there was no medicine for the affliction superior or equal in efficacy to flight. But to where? Our need to have the freedom sufficient to satisfy our appetites not as recluses, but free to enviously regard those things particularly to our taste or liking.
Lamenting our misery, we fear to remain, yet dare not flee.”
* * * * * *
The sculptures in Christopher Wise’s exhibition Affliction reveal the power in the infinitesimal. Microscopic specimens: spores, bacteria, viruses are recreated on a grand scale. The prosaic materials, common to Thailand, hint at the dark roots of materialism, industry and policy whose banality make us ill. Yet the bold primary colors have a simple beauty that echoes the seductive qualities of the “entertainments and devices” we are addicted to, things we know are unhealthy but can’t put away. Reminiscent of enlarged toys, the specimens symbolize an immature curiosity that never learns. Objects are multiplied to be come a new object, as cells divide and grow to become organisms. With the addition of other surfaces or other objects, they evolve to become more beautiful, addictive and irresistible.
In “Le desert, Albert Camus speaks of a “repugnant materialism” where everything we do and pursue in a capitalist age ravages our very existence — where we voluntarily swap dead ideas for living realities, another type of contagion. The Plague of Camus’ novel, the critic John Cruikshank insists, is also a reflection on “man’s metaphysical dereliction in the world.” We are powerless to resist, no vaccines or antibodies can stop us spreading the affliction. We “share” and “like” our phantasmagoria across the world.
In “Le desert, Albert Camus speaks of a “repugnant materialism” where everything we do and pursue in a capitalist age ravages our very existence — where we voluntarily swap dead ideas for living realities, another type of contagion. The Plague of Camus’ novel, the critic John Cruikshank insists, is also a reflection on “man’s metaphysical dereliction in the world.” We are powerless to resist, no vaccines or antibodies can stop us spreading the affliction. We “share” and “like” our phantasmagoria across the world.
The pieces are named in Latin, referring to a resemblance to events and things occurring during our own time of affliction.
WTF Café & Gallery
7 Sukhumvit Soi 51, Wattana, Klongton-Nua, Bangkok 10110
BTS: Thonglor Opening times: Tuesday – Sunday, 4-10pm
Free Admission
For further information please contact:
Somrak Sila, somrak@wtfbangkok.com
Christopher Wise, cw@wtfbangkok.com
Tel: +66 (0)2 662 6246
================
Christopher Wise: AFFLICTION [Coming Soon]
June 25th, 2019Opening July 19th 7pm
Art installations by Christopher Wise
B-Floor: What’s left: Resonance from the Discarded
June 25th, 201919 June – 7 July
(no show on Mon & tue)
“What’s left: Resonance from the Discarded”
A double bill performance
1. “Coherence”
By TAMJAI (Surat Kaewseekram)
2. “Soapernatural”
By Kwin Bhichitkul
19 June – 7 July (no show on Mon & tue)
7.30 pm
At WTF Gallery, Soi Sukhumvit51, BTS thonglor exit 1
Ticket 550 .-
Student price 500.-
Group promotion (5 tickets) 2400.- (480.- each)
(for 2 performances)
Reservations
0622236996
Line id: @dee_ng
Fb Page:
B-floor
Dee-ng
Planet Krypton
April 7th, 2019Immersive Exhibition
By Prontip Mankong in collaboration with Pisitakun Kuntalang
Curator: Somrak Sila co-curated by Penwadee Nophaket Manont
26 April – 2 June 2019
Opening Reception: Friday 26 April 2019, 7pm
WTF Gallery is delighted to invite you to “Planet Krypton”, a one-of-a-kind immersive experience that will challenge many of society’s assumptions. The exhibition uses interactive and multimedia installations as a potential for creativity, to expose the ambiguity of our imaginings and the reality that society often assiduously turns away from.
The exhibition was born from a desire to tell the story of Prontip Mankong, a Thai activist and performing artist who has also staged several plays addressing social and political issues in Thailand. Starting in 2014 Prontip served two years and ten days in one of the world’s most crowded and dismal jails after being convicted of violating Thailand’s absurd lese majeste laws by participating in the play “The Wolf Bride”. After she finally left Bangkok’s Central Women’s Correctional Institution, Prontip became a vocal campaigner for prison reform in Thailand. She immediately started a support group to assist former inmates after their release. This exhibition hopes to bring the audiences by a circuitous route closer to the life of some of these prisoners.
To conceptualise this very delicate and complex reality into a contemporary art exhibition, the curating team invited Pisitakun Kuntalang, a multi-disciplinary artist, to exchanges ideas with Prontip and other former inmates. Pisitakun’s work investigates his experience seeking to make sense of their histories, aiming to connect the personal experiences of the sufferers, artist and audience and engage with history, politics, economics and popular culture, but with a heavy dose of humour to make the subject palatable to easily alarmed audiences.
Pistakun and Prontip are in the final analysis in search of humanity under extreme conditions, where a compete denial of freedom forces people to adjust and control their integrity. This process led them to the question what is human degradation and what can turn it, besides the acquisition mere survival mechanisms, it into a kind of ‘superhuman’ potential, like that found on planet Krypton, home of damaged superheroes.
WTF Café & Gallery
7 Sukhumvit Soi 51, Wattana, Klongton-Nua, Bangkok 10110
www.wtfbangkok.com
BTS: Thonglor Opening times: Tuesday – Sunday, 4-10pm
Free Admission
For further information please contact:
Somrak Sila
Tel: +66 (0)2 662 6246, +66 (0)89 926 5474
Email: somrak@wtfbangkok.com
Food Pop-Up
March 4th, 2019An irregular, but ongoing series of creative food events during 2019. Northern Thai Food and Portuguese so far…
Headache Stencil: Thailand Casino
March 4th, 201924 February – 31 March 2019
Opening reception: Sunday 24 February 2018, 2pm
After several rejections by local galleries here, Headache Stencil presents his 2nd solo show in Bangkok “Thailand Casino”. As audacious and provocative as always, Headache Stencil creates a new installation art to express his personal notions on the ever delayed and broken promises stories of Thailand’s election in 2019 after the junta took over Thailand since 2014. The artist aims to be an agent of changes by creating the visuals through his understanding on the most current and debatable issue in our today society.
Thailand Casino exhibition aims to encourage the viewers to be more courageous and respond provocatively to the systems and structures of control by the authorities on this latest election.
Headache Stencil is a pseudonymous Thailand-born street artist and political activist. Dubbed Thailand’s version of the British graffiti artist Banksy, Headache catapulted to fame in January 2018 with his graffiti of the Thai junta No.2 Prawit Wongsuwan’s face inside an alarm clock, a jab at the lack of financial transparency by the generals, who was struggling to explain his collection of undeclared luxury watches. In March 2018, he was in the spotlight for his graffiti of a black panther crying tears of blood, a reference to the case of a Thai construction magnate who was later charged with poaching one of the protected cats during an illegal safari hunt in a national park. In September 2018, he depicted Thai junta chief Prayut Chan-o-cha as "a lucky cat" with a paw raised to rake in money.
His nickname "Headache" alludes to the pain he hopes to inflict on the mighty.
Visitor information
WTF Gallery & Café
7 Sukhumvit Soi 51, Wattana, Klongton-Nua, Bangkok 10110
www.wtfbangkok.com
BTS: Thonglor Opening times: Tuesday – Sunday, 4-10pm
Free Admission
New Years Eve if you have no plans and want to avoid an overpriced party!
December 21st, 2018
Come by for good music and good drinks. We’ll supply the hats!