Exhibition by Sanitas Pradittasnee

Curated by Sébastien Tayac

Duration: 13 August – 15 December 2022

at Gallery Seescape, Chiang Mai

        In art we always speak about site-specific works, when works are custom made for a specific space, room, or area. You prefer the term Life-specific not site-specific. What does it mean?
        Life-specific means timeless and selfless. Everyone can understand this, because it is natural with no self-relational aesthetic. For example, with site-specific or performing, you need to have experience in that space  and time of the event. If you are not at the event, you don’t understand the work. The way I am talking about life-specific is beyond time, space, knowledge, and self-centricity. It is about humanity in general. Every living being will understand this through realising in human values such as love, compassion, etc…

Interview with Kamin Lertchaiprasert by Lisa Polten, ” ” (Emptiness), 2019

       “Life-specific” is a term that perfectly fits the spirit emanating from Moment of Contemplation by Sanitas Pradittasnee. Even though her inspiration arises from personal experience — as a Thai woman, an architect, an artist, a daughter — the way she leads us through her installations generates a timeless, human resonance. In a world where everything goes fast, where everything happens instantly, where many artists are choosing to use new technology to immerse viewers in their work, Sanitas gives us an opportunity to return to contemplation.

       Our memory — composed of both things remembered and imagined — constantly evolves as we encounter new experiences in the present, which give birth to the meaning of this moment. Facing oblivion, our memory remains alive as long as our existence lives through others. If memory (whether quotidian, historical, imaginative, private, or public) and the functioning of the brain are at the heart of the work of artists like Christian Boltanski (1944– 2021), directors like Christopher Nolan (b.1970), and philosophers like Henri Bergson (1859– 1941) or Paul Ricœur (1913–2005), it is because these functions continue to fascinate and to inspire attempts at better understanding them through a variety of approaches, whether religious, spiritual, or scientific. Both installations recall these ideas, emphasizing different meanings or levels of interpretation of memory by creating various effects of reflection from glass mirrors, stainless steel mirrors, and water. These materials are rather common and familiar to the artist, a kind of nod to her past work, but in the context of this exhibition, they take on a more symbolic role, as they bring, on one hand, clarity, appeasement, and peace of mind, and on the other hand, a powerful opposite effect: When combined with sunlight, these materials can blur our vision. These alternate effects speak to a certain ambivalence toward the power of memory.

Within the black walls of the smaller room of the gallery, we witness a collection of earthen sculptures placed upon mirrored surfaces, which are no mere pedestals for the work: the tables and the sculptures demand to be perceived together. The resulting conversation between earth and steel recalls the artist’s and her mother’s relationship to the bustling of Bangkok and the abundant calm of Doi Chiang Dao, the latter a place offering a greater sense of serenity in the face of illness. In this sense, by bringing the soil of Chiang Dao into Gallery Seescape (though in a different manner than Earth Room by Walter de Maria, in which the artist filled a 3,600 ft.2 room with 250 yd.3 of earth, 22 in. deep) Sanitas wishes to share the quiet feelings that this place and its colors inspire. The soil was incorporated into two aspects of the installation: The hanging textiles were soaked in soil and water in a metal tray, after having been screen printed. Though the result of this process may appear abstract, they are, in fact, networks of neurons overlayed with the silhouette of various faces of the mountain. As well, soil was incorporated into the clay of the sculptures in the black room.

The coiling technique used creates a succession of rings that overlap and stack upon each other. The curves and undulations of these pieces give them a musical aspect, a rhythm, a melody, and offer an allusion to the neural networks of the brain. These speak to a lullaby-like memory sustained by the pulse of life, of hope, of calm. Further, the simple purity of these lines and curves crescendo into triangular forms, reminding us of a meditating Buddha, a chedi (a symbol that also appeared in her past series, Form of Belief I to V) or a mountain. Unexpectedly, these forms also offer us another degree of reading, visible at their base, which is revealed in reflection.

Reminiscent of the works of Montien Booma (1953–2000) or Pinaree Sanpitak (b.1961), the installations Sanitas presents to us here exude spirituality through their purity of form and material and their sense of quiet. When facing the uncertainties of memory and its inevitable loss, what better response can we have than forming new memories in this space, in this resolutely human experience the artist has offered us?

by Sébastien Tayac