แผ่นดิน/Tanah/Land: Surajate Tongchua and Maryanto 2023

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16albermarle is pleased to present แผ่นดิน/Tanah/Land, an exhibition of recent work by Surajate Tongchua and Maryanto, two southeast Asian artists whose work critically engages with landscape, the environment and political authority in the region.

Surajate Tongchua (b. 1986) graduated in Printmaking from Chiang Mai University and lives and works in Chiang Mai, a city surrounded by spectacular mountainous landscapes. So it's not surprising that mountains are the inspiration for his recent series, Lying Mountains. But Tongchua is also passionately interested in politics, particularly the fractured politics of his own country, Thailand. In Lying Mountains he brings both interests together in works which employ the massive forms of mountains to question authority or the lack of it.

Indonesian artist Maryanto (b. 1976) also studied printmaking and its influence is felt in his series When the Tree Falls. For this series, he created works in various media to explore the rampant development of palm oil plantations in South Kalimantan and their encroachment onto the local forests. At the same time, he touches on the themes of transmigration, ownership and capitalism. While Maryanto does not frame his practice as environmental activism, his works can be considered aspirational: bringing public awareness to issues he is otherwise not able to change on his own.

The works in แผ่นดิน/Tanah/Land show how those in power - government, monarchy, corporations - can be abusive to land. But they also raise important questions: who owns the land? Individual land is owned by individuals, but what about public land, or land in general? How can it be protected, how can it be cared for, how can it be useful to people equally? Visually, these works convey positive and negative responses. They heighten the collective sense of burden and heaviness, but speak with imagery and language which somehow enriches and empowers the viewer.