ABOUT

PISITAKUN KUANTALAENG (Project Director / Producer)

Growing up in Thailand’s art scenes during one of the country’s most politically unstable periods, Pisitakun Kuantalaeng kicked off his practice as a visual artist in 2009, essentially focused on political speculations and frustrations. Thailand’s 2010 Red Shirt protests and the government crackdown solidified his approach as a permanent critical thinker and artist. One of the works that first brought him into the spotlight,

 “The Unfinished History” initiated in 2012, queries the truth hidden behind political power and conflicted histories by asking who is allowed to write history. The project proposes a re-writing of histories in the form of drawings and comic strips, and includes blank spaces where the public can also add their own interpretations. The work continues to travel and evolve, exploring multiple dimensions of histories by allowing different groups of people to collaboratively create an alternative library of world histories.

Pisitakun’s interest in music started to increase. He began to experiment with how sonic expressions take shape under different media environments. The multimedia work “Black Country” (2017) was born out of forced confrontation in a country where things go beyond rationality. In the show, which combined noise and techno sonics with black metal aesthetics and performance, a set of made-up beliefs and rituals of a fictitious country were played out to humourous scrutiny.

Music has subsequently turned out to be an important part of Pisitakun’s career. He joined Chinabot – a platform and collective created to change the dialogue surrounding Asian music – through which he released multiple albums. SOSLEEP (2018) was created shortly after the death of his father from cancer, and combined traditional mourning instruments with harsh noise and techno beats, wrapping them around intimate recordings of the hospital machinery that kept his father alive during his final days. Absolute C.O.U.P. (2020) questioned democracy and freedom of expression in Thailand, which seem like a far-off dream. Thailand has undergone 13 military coups d’états following the Siamese Revolution in 1932, more than any other country in modern history. Kongkraphan (2022) presents the forgotten voices of Thai protesters, and the sounds of wrath towards an unjust situation. The title literally means invulnerable or immortal, and also signifies a type of Thai talisman that grants invincibility. In this album, it stands for the ideology and fighting spirit of the protesters, which have never faded. Pisitakun’s practice represents a decisive break from many of his Thai peers: he questions fundamental and increasingly global values without merely decrying the fact of corruption or offering neat palliatives. Pisitakun Kuantalaeng (b.1986) graduated with a BFA in Sculpture, School of Architecture, Art, and Design – King Mongkut’s Institute of Technology Ladkrabang, Bangkok, Thailand. His artworks have been shown at the Bangkok Art and Culture Centre (BACC), Kuandu Biennale 2014 (Taipei), Jogja Biennale 2019 (Yogyakarta), Rua Do Sol and A Leste (Porto, 2021-2022). His music was performed at CTM Festival (Berlin), Asian Meeting Festival (Tokyo), MEIA (Aveiro), Spaziomusica Festival (Cagliari),  and Cafe OTO (London,). He is supported by the European SHAPE+ platform in 2022/23. He currently lives and works in Europe

PENWADEE NOPHAKET MANONT (Co-Producer)

Born in 1973, California, USA. Live and Work in Thailand, Penwadee is currently an Independent Curator and Researcher, a Cultural Worker, the Founder of Rai.D Collective and Co-Founder of Project-PRY. 

Her curatorial experiences include UNDERLYING, under the Mekong Art and Culture, a curatorial and traveling exhibition project (2007-2008); Poperomia/Golden Teardrop, at the Thai Pavilion, the 55th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia, Italy (2013); [R]Ejecting Mantra, a research and archive-based exhibition series (2017-present); Altered-in-Between, underthe Migration Narratives in East and Southeast Asia, a research and contemporary art exhibition project in Germany, Mongolia, South Korea, Thailand (2018-2020); Do we live in the same PLAYGROUND? at Biennale Jogja XV Equator#5, Yogyakarta, Indonesia (2019); BERSAMA Minority Voicing Festival, an alternative art festival based on a collaborative platform of art and cultural practitioners from different regions invited to create and foster the vibration of various marginalized people’s voicing out together (2019-present).

From 2016 onwards, Penwadee has founded Rai.D Collective, a group of Curators & Cultural Workers, to carry out arts and culture projects along with social-historical research; started [R]Ejecting Mantra, a research & archive-based exhibition series aiming to create artworks through collaboration between artists and specialists in various fields, to reflect over consequences of Nationalism ideology, myth and discourse currently impact Thailand. Since the beginning of 2020, she has co-founded Project-PRY, a Curatorial-Movement Initiative initiated to touch upon socio-political issues and work under locality-based practices. Her first practice concerned the ISAN (Northeastern) grassroots’ poverty issue in Thailand, resulted in Project-PRY#01: Sacrifice by Adisak Phupa, an Isan Artist whose focus is of those who live from hand to mouth where dream and reality fatally meet (2020-2021). For Project-PRY#02 x RasaDrums ―a combination of the words Rasadorn meaning the people and drums― was featured with the aim to investigate and illustrate the history and ideology of the activist artists performing side-by-side with the political demonstrators; how and if they might have played an important role and be able to pass on their sonic vibration and rhythmic diversity among social, cultural, economic and political reckoning of the past two years (2021-2022). 

Born in Portugal in 1983, José currently lives and works in Lisbon. He developed an interest in software programming at a young age, creating small games and computer programs in Pascal and Java. This interest led him to pursue a Computer Engineering course at the Instituto Superior Técnico, where he studied and earned a master's degree in Computing Distributed Systems and Artificial Intelligence.

As a freelancer, José is currently engaged with FORUM (www.forumeducation.nyc), a tutoring agency based in New York, where he maintains and develops software solutions. Simultaneously, he offers his services to small businesses, providing software development consulting and creating custom software systems to meet their needs.

In addition to his work with businesses, José also has an interest in socially relevant and artistic projects. He has worked with the CADA group (www.cada1.net) on several projects, including the A MOEDA project and TYRO (tyro.cada1.net).

José is also currently focused on research and independent software development. He is interested in artificial intelligence, specifically conversational systems. His research aims to create frameworks that enable developers to build complex conversational agent products, while also ensuring these tools are simple to use. A significant part of his work involves incorporating social responsibility into the development of these conversational agents. In addition to this, José is also researching and developing in the field of low-code frameworks for backend systems. His work involves the use of microservice and event-driven software architectures, and the creation of domain-specific languages for software composition. This research aims to simplify the development process while still allowing for the creation of robust and efficient systems.