The Blogazine

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Pratchaya Phinthong / Give More Than You Take

From May 27 to July 24 GAMeC, Galleria d’arte moderna e contemporanea in Bergamo – in co-production with CAC, Centre d’Art Contemporain in Brétigny-sur-Orge – is hosting the solo show ‘Give more than you take’ by Thai artist Pratchaya Phinthong.

The exhibition is curated by CAC Director Pierre Bal-Blanc, and Alessandro Rabottini, Chief-Curator at GAMeC, and is part of the museum exhibition program Eldorado, which aims at inviting international emerging artists to think about site-specific project.

In 2010, Phinthong was invited to attend a two-month residency program at CAC Brétigny. Instead of going to Paris, the artist proposed Pierre Bal-Blanc to go to Swedish Lapland – recruited by a firm specialisin in exporting workforce for the seasonal harvest – to pick polar berries. This way Phinthong could live with Thai laborers, renouncing the status of artist, and see both the terrible conditions of the workers and the absence of rights that brought them to protest against unrestrained capitalism. At the end of each day the artist, through SMS correspondence, updated the CAC Director about the amount of berries he picked, and asked him to collect the same quantity of useless objects and garbage.

During the picking season, Phinthong, with the help of the workers, knocked down a shooting tower in the forest and sent the pieces to Pierre Bal-Blanc to be reassembled according to his personal point of view – Bal-Blanc opted for rebuilding and displaying it at CAC.

The tower is now presented in Bergamo as a monolith, a mass of wooden boards hung on the ceiling at its original height. Alessandro Rabottini, who joined the dialogue between the artist and Bal-Blanc bringing the exhibition in GAMeC, decided the entire arrangement of the collected objects – the wooden boards and the 549 kilos of earth dug close to the GAMeC – and, to reinforce his participation in the dialogue, he choose to handwrite the SMS in on the wall of the Museum.

Among the works that complete the show: a case containing the amount of money gained by the artist working as a polar berry picker (283€); a website www.givemorethanyoutake.net, which collects images and videos recorded by Phinthong during his experience in Swedish Lapland and two oil paintings, made by a Thai artist, which can be sold separately but need a previous agreement among the buyers as they should be displayed in other exhibitions only together.

‘Give more than you take’ is a project based on the importance of exchange among human beings. The transfer of tasks between the artist, who loses his role, and the curator, who takes the responsibility of presenting the objects to the visitors, changes the value and meaning of the artworks, following the idea that social progress is strictly connected with giving, receiving and returning.

Pratchaya Phinthong (1974, lives and works in Bangkok) has exhibited his oeuvre at international institutions such as the Kunsthalle Basel, the Musée D’art Contemporain in Lyon, the University Gallery in Bangkok, the Artists Space in New York and RedCat in Los Angeles. He has also participated in the Biennials of Singapore, Taipei and Busan.

The exhibition will run until July 24 at GAMeC, Via San Tomaso 53, Bergamo.