(un)identified: exhibition opens soon (party later ;) )

(un)identified

Nigel Power & Juthamas Tangsantikul
H Gallery Project Space, Bangkok
13.11.14 - 14.12.14

There will be a closing event for this exhibition on 4th December 6-8pm

One or two thoughts on (un)identified
The American artist Renée Green often refers to an odd and anomalous property of the archive1. That is, the recurring and disruptive significance of chance and serendipity in an institution that is, above all, predicated on order, structure and predictability. According to Green the archive is haunted by moments of counterintuitive unpredictability that she terms ‘lacunae’—unforeseen or overlooked fissures within or beyond an overarching classificatory logic; a logic that seeks at once to naturalise and produce epistemological and social boundaries. It is in these in-between spaces that ‘records’ become unruly, perturb official narratives and insinuate new modes of remembering. It is here that ‘documents’ murmur of different ways of bringing the past into the present and seeing the present in the mirror of the past.

Whilst working on historical research in the National Archive of Thailand we chanced upon two such ‘lacunae’. The first was a collection of photographic portraits consigned to a kind of non-category. On the fringe of the main archive are three or four filing cabinets dedicated to people whom the archivists have, as yet, been unable to identify. Amongst these we became intrigued by a large set of studio portraits from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In these, representatives of a transforming Thai elite, work through the problems and possibilities of self-presentation. Drawing upon a range of often contradictory symbolic registers—bureaucratic and bourgeois, indigenous and international, traditional and modern, martial and civilian—our forgotten subjects speak silently of the peculiar yet powerful role that photography played in the formation and communication of individual and class identities in Thailand.

Whilst the first lacuna occupied a kind of categorical limbo, the second had escaped the classificatory logic of the archive altogether. On a table by the door, we encountered loose piles of unlabeled photographic reproductions—ordered but not collected—offered for sale. Amongst these we came across a small set of images of disheveled and manacled men from the same period as the studio portraits. These involuntary portraits were arresting in their own right: signal examples of early photography’s other role as the visual medium of criminology, anthropology and colonialism—the representation and production of dangerous others. Seen alongside our studio portraits, however, they both animated and illustrated a contradiction closer to home, a contradiction that continues to haunt Thai society to this day: the simultaneous construction of centres of spectacular power, status and authority and subordinate peripheries of class, region and ethnicity. 

This accidental montage and the ideas that it animated took us on a range of further (and as yet far from finished) journeys through the photographic archive and into other forms of documentary evidence. Presented here, however—using the simplest possible aesthetic procedures—is a montage of two archival lacunae that murmured to each other and whispered to us: two very different sets of portraits of very different people taken at an earlier period of photographic efflorescence. 

Nigel Power

Notes
1. Renée Green, “Ruminations on Archival Lacunae”, Interarchival Practices and Sites in the Contemporary Art Field, Beatrice von Bismarck, et al., Eds. (Cologne: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walter König, 2002)