Born 1977, Phrae, Thailand

Multidisciplinary artist Piyarat Piyapongwiwat asks us to consider how global culture flows in an age of porous national borders. She is interested in the ‘non-places’ of the contemporary world; tourist sites, free trade areas, border zones, refugee camps, migrant hostels are all liminal zones where local cultures encounter the global, becoming hybrid, transnational sites of uncertainty, crime, and exploitation. messages from nowhere to nowhere (2015) was developed during a three-month artist residency in Pattaya City, a tourist area and ‘special administrative zone’ that is home to a fluid, transitory population of migrants, temporary workers and visitors.

Piyapongwiwat, herself a global artist who studied firstly in Australia at RMIT and then at the Ecole Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Montpellier Agglomération, Montpellier, France, collected statements from this multilingual, multi-ethnic population and projected them onto the facades of buildings in busy areas. messages from nowhere to nowhere amplifies the voices of this floating world. She makes visible the voices of the marginalised, those who are mostly unheard and invisible – housekeepers, gardeners, Burmese, Khmer, tourists, bar owners, sex workers, umbrella rental service workers on the beach, procurers in bars. In the cacophony of the city these single, poignant sentences battle with advertising for the attention of passers-by.

The neon installation Can You Sing The National Anthem? (2015), itself part of the messages from nowhere project, has a particular resonance in fiercely nationalistic Thai society. It represents the disempowerment and dislocation of Pattaya’s population, while simultaneously alluding to the flashing neon of its seedy nightlife. Posed as a question demanding an answer, the work reminds us of the uncertain status of the migrant attempting to make their way in a culture not their own. Piyapongwiwat’s practice exposes the human consequences of the cracks in the globalised economy.