Chitti Kasemkitvatana
mo(nu)ment/mem(y)orial
Chitti Kasemkitvatana’s installation Mo(nu)ment / (…) / mem(y)orial is one of the artist’s first artworks after his retreat as a monk. This artwork is at once an exhibition configuration and an attempt to formalize a reflection. Composed of elementary geometric objects, Mo(nu)ment / (…) / mem(y)orial, refers to different sharing and transmitting media systems, which are illustrated here in a closed book, a fan, loose sheets of paper, or a box filled with gold powder. The introspective experience proposed by the artist invites us to search for an emptiness that will bring us to spirituality, to meditate and try to seize the essence of all things, to lose, retrieve and dematerialize the substance in order to reach the spiritual.
Chitti Kasemkitvatana is an artist, independent curator, and teacher; he presents an art program on the radio and is the co-editor of the magazine Ver with Rirktit Tiravanija. From 1995 to 2001, he was very active on the artistic scene in Bangkok. Then he became a Buddhist monk for seven years and retired in the northern forests of Thaïland before coming back to his artistic work, exploring the porosity between art and spiritual life, through a minimal and conceptual approach.