Testing Platforms: Lunds

Statement
Lak-ka-pid-lak-ka-perd : An Art Re-Search Site

Lund Konsthall, 9 th -17 th September 2006

The Lak-ka-pid-lak-ka-perd : An Art Re-search Site is the second art exhibition in the series of Lak-ka-pid-lak-ka-perd : contemporary urban conditions with special reference to Thai homosexuality art research. While the first one, Lak-ka-pid-lak-ka-perd : the Bangkok Invisible Landscapes (2005), explores the urban conditions that is are site-specific to Bangkok and tests out the ideas and concepts of lak-ka-pid-lak-ka-perd through art exhibitions from various artists, film screenings, and seminars by various speakers, Lak-ka-pid-lak-ka-perd : An Art Re-Search Site (2006) attempts to open up, to experiment with a kind of art research site in a similar way to the archaeology sites which have been valuable to archaeological studies. Through many years of research, different kinds of knowledge regarding the relationship between space and homosexuality have been produced through various projects in different forms of visual representation. The exhibition juxtaposes video arts, documentaries , photographs, home page, visual documentations and catalogues from past exhibitions and film festivals, film-screenings, texts, and a thesis-art book made for this exhibition further explains the non-linear concept of lak-ka-pid-lak-ka-perd to create an art re-search site.

The exhibition takes the site out from its Asian and Thai contexts, for the Other to observe, to look at, to scrutinise, to study and possibly to realise and re-discover their own conditions. The further you dig into the site, the more the invisible layers of knowledge will be revealed. It is an artifact in both senses, a historical object and an art object. By juxtaposing different forms of representation and different research approaches and materials from various projects throughout the research, one can search for meaning that lies in and between each work. As George Bataille suggests, referring to non-knowledge, it is not the kind of review of knowledge that could appear systematic (2001, p. 112). Lak-ka-pid-lak-ka-perd has also become a condition that one has to experience in its multiple forms in order to understand. One has to occupy the multi-positions of in and out, closed and open, here and there to take part in it.

It is through the gap, the in-between, the void, the absence that we need to search for. Paul Virilio compares the field of vision to the ground in archaeological exploration: To see is to be lying in wait for what must spring up from the ground, nameless...what presents no interest whatsoever, what is silent will speak, what is closed is going to open (2005, p. 29). It is only through the persistence of perception that one can see; this is a fragile state of in-between forms - anti-form, the form of transparency. It is in these between forms that lak-ka-pid-lak-ka-perd , a contemporary urban condition, can be better understood.

Images

Photographs courtesy from Lunds Konsthall
The project is organised in collaboration with Thingsmatter (Thailand) & Chirathaka Chittiratanakorn.