Collapsing Clouds Form Stars, 2025, consists of 279 long, slender blue ribbons, each bearing an inscription—taken from sources such as songs, poems, protest signs, letters, public speeches, and so on—and dangling from a wooden dowel. Here at Gallery VER, the ribbons stretched almost from ceiling to floor. The same title was shared not only by the show—billed as a mini-retrospective of works by Som Supaparinya—but by a twenty-four-minute video, made in 2021 and projected upon the gallery’s back wall, with images of places in Thailand where protests have been violently suppressed in recent years.
A collection of books lay on a bench against a wall. What was in them? Impossible to tell: The books were inaccessible, wrapped up in ribbons. They are part of Supaparinya’s “Banned Books Series,” 2015–. The paradox becomes evident: The information that these books provide consists merely of the fact that we cannot have access to their contents. Today, technology seems to offer the possibility of knowing everything that happens anywhere all at once, but it also allows information to be hidden, manipulated, censored, faked. Distinguishing between what may or may not be seen, between what can and cannot be known, is an acute problem for contemporary culture and politics. These quandaries are even more pressing in societies with extensive informal economies and opaque power structures. How can we assess the scope of what is not shown to us? Prohibited books exemplify not only what we can’t know, but what we may not even know that we don’t know.
Projected in a second, darkened room was the sixteen-minute video The Unsung Lyric of Ping, 2025, a collaboration with English musician Helen Ganya. The delightful visual beauty of the film—whose cinematography produces exceptional contrasts of color and light—reveals itself as cruel, as we begin to perceive that we are in fact watching a documentation of the diversion of the Ping River. The most important waterway in northern Thailand, the Ping was redirected in 2024 by a large dam, with disastrous effects on the natural environment along its course and the people who live there.
Another video, The Rivers They Don’t See, 2024, follows the course of the Salween River along the border between Myanmar and Thailand to the Gulf of Thailand. Not in this show, the video was first presented at the National Gallery of Thailand during the 2024 Bangkok Art Biennale. More than a documentary, it is a sort of poetic homage to the lifeways of populations that intersect with Supaparinya’s personal and familial connection to the region.
Supaparinya’s work investigates the destructive transformations of natural and urban landscapes that result from political and economic decisions made without regard for affected communities. In a demonstration captured in The Unsung Lyric of Ping, one can glimpse protest signs: NO DAM, RIGHT OF RIVERS. But one of the most dramatic aspects of the ecological catastrophe results from a paradox of visibility and invisibility. In many cases, all one can show are the remains of what no longer can be seen because it has already been destroyed. When artists seek to make visible that which is still disappearing, their work can attain a tragic urgency, arriving at the final hour, or even too late. What we can still see in a video may already have entered the register of what has already been lost.
Translated from Portuguese by Liam Seeley.
