Choices

Has collecting shifted from the search and acquisition of the physical object?  In the 21st century, we have seen a distinct redefinition of cultural capital as the accumulation of rare objects and tomes has been superseded by the creation of material conditions to attract the new migratory culture of artists, designers, professors and venture capitalist among others. One has only to look at the new initiatives spawned in the nodes of emerging cultural centers: the creation in China of 1,200 museums by 2010, the subsidizing of artists Singapore and the strategic academic and cultural developments in Abu Dhabi are among some recent examples.

It is this new mobile cosmopolitan class that the photographer Maitree Siriboon, based in Bangkok, has  been able to participate in while retaining his distinct sense of distance as something which not only measures how far one has gone but also as a quantifiable links to the past. Isarn Boy Dream jarringly displaces the mobile cosmopolitans out of urban circulation into the tranquil rural fields of eastern Thailand. The artist himself plays with his own past rural identity positing a stripped down hybrid evoking a simplicity contrasted with bourgeois aloofness. Devoid of fixed boundaries, the artist approaches self-identification more as a cast of roles which one creates merges and chooses from in any given context.

Rupturing the separation of urban and rural, Siriboon collides space and time to create a sort of temporal void as though the survivors from a plane wreck on the way to the Shanghai Biennale slide uninterrupted into the backdrop of Waiting for Godot.

One of the by-products of this constant movement across borders, timezones and cultures is the inevitable cross pollination and realignment. This constant re-formation also creates an accompanying paradox, the specter of nostalgia. The specter of nostalgia consists of a singular perspective on the past of location or culture, this hegemonic interpretation is clear and distinct though shrouded in a vetrine of time, visible but unattainable. Hannes Bend plays with this phantom in his recasting of cultural icons into hand candy. The mounted stags head, the symbol of man’s conquest of nature is preserved in crystallized sugar. Power undermined by the absurd. Reinforced by the title, DIR, the informal usage of you in German, confronts the austere formality of the past with the casual present. Violence becomes a fixated in glucose, the saccharine victory of the past over barbarism recreated as the trophy for a new pluralism, though maybe this sweetness lasts only as long as an after-dinner mint.