Born 1992, Pattani, Thailand

Kusofiyah Nibuesa invites us into a world far from the visual clichés of tourist Thailand. Her intricately detailed paper relief sculptures transport us to Thailand’s far south, a region close to the border with Malaysia that has suffered ongoing religious and ethnic tension and unrest. But rather than focusing on this instability, Nibuesa represents instead a harmonious multicultural community. Working with cut paper, printing and stencilling techniques to create immersive images of daily life, she depicts a world in which all Thai citizens – Muslims, Buddhists and Chinese – co-exist peacefully.

A member of the Muslimah Collective, a collaborative group of five female Muslim artists, Nibuesa explores her cultural and faith heritage through works depicting the life of the bustling markets of Pattani. Textile designs become markers of identity: a man wearing a sarong and a loose, patterned shirt pushes a cart laden with bags of rice or market produce, and veiled women seated behind wicker baskets overflowing with fish, fruit, and spices wear intricately patterned robes.

Nibuesa, who studied printmaking at Silpakorn University, makes astute and carefully considered decisions that enhance the visual and emotional impact of her works. Multicultural, The Cart (both 2021), Deep South Market (2016) and Deep South Market 2 (2022) each suggest an ambiguous narrative – tiny vignettes of daily life that might otherwise go unnoticed are enlarged, becoming newly significant. Removing her subjects from their busy backgrounds, overlapping her paper forms so they cast shadows against the gallery wall, the artist enables us to focus on individual men and women. Navigating tensions between artistic tradition and contemporaneity with works that experiment with techniques of sculptural printmaking and papercutting, Nibuesa celebrates the lives of those who are often invisible in the geopolitical discourses of our time. In her work, ordinary people and the routines and rhythms of daily life are not so ordinary after all.