Jakkai Siributr

Jakkai Siributr’s assemblages of fabrics, tchotchkes, beads, and personal memorabilia immediately prompt questions about the reasons to play with both the experiential and the iconic. Siributr grew up on the ‘spirit-filled’ streets of Bangkok, where there is an everyday animism: spirit-houses and shrines, devotional offerings of coke bottles and ornate garlands, glittering temples, and saffron-robed trees. This is one context with which to consider Siributr’s exceptional methods within contemporary art.

Siributr also meditates on memories that persist and carry a discomforting sense of the uncanny, both personal and political. The works build on the excavation of his family’s history, and the ways in which those lives intersected with the troubled past of the country’s road to modernity. The tapestries provide integrity to those who bore the stigma of a perilous chapter in Thai history; some works even repurpose his parents’ clothes as both memorial and celebration.

Siributr breaches the norms of art and craft: a refusal of regional specificity or a questioning of easy categorization that is not reducible to nativist or folksy interest. He allows us to look anew at art that claims a distinction in both making and meaning. All the more compelling when the experience of personal loss is at stake.

—Brian Curtin