Born 1985, Nakhonphanom, Thailand

Bussaraporn Thongchai’s drawings, paintings and collages reveal the lived experiences of women, to devastating effect. They are provocations, hand grenades aimed at the patriarchy. Thongchai takes aim at institutions and behaviours that subordinate women and reinforce gendered structures and systems of power. Basing many of her works on her own experiences of male violence and coercive control in her family and in subsequent relationships with men, her work is a powerful critique of the effects of what has come to be called toxic masculinity.

Now living in Berlin, Thongchai is confronted with the global scale of violence against women, and the intersections between social class, race and gender. Working at a shelter for migrant women from Africa, southeast Asia and eastern Europe, assisting women applying for asylum as a cultural and language mediator, her life and work has become sharply focused on issues of human trafficking and the commodification of women’s bodies in the sex trade. This, she says, ‘has made my life surrounded by words and stories from unknown women’.

Her experiences in Berlin influenced a shift in her practice from figurative paintings and drawings to conceptual and text-based works. The Dialogue series of 2022 is a visual representation of the inadequacy of language. Thongchai thought about the conversations in which she had participated – their slippages in translation, silences within speech, lies and evasions, and awful truths that remained unsaid. She made collages from expired migration documents and interview transcripts, removing sensitive personal data and reorganising the text into short ‘conversations’ with gaps and holes in the dialogue. They are intentionally absurd, confusing and incoherent. The experience of a German-speaking audience will be different, of course, but for all viewers the Dialogue series conveys a sense of the contrapuntal layering of many women’s voices in immigration interview rooms and courtrooms, telling stories of courage and stories of despair. For the artist, it felt like ‘carrying messages from one world to another’.