Yavuz Fine Art presents internationally renowned Thai artist Navin Rawanchaikul with a series of new works at Art Dubai 2014.

One of Thailand's most prolific contemporary artists, Rawanchaikul is known for his animated and accessible brand of situational art, which incorporates an entertaining theatre of media, methods, and collaborative characters. Creating elaborate egocentric narratives that blur fact and fantasy, his artistic approach involves direct interventions, social commentary, and an innovative style of integrating community or individual experiences. A recurrent theme in his oeuvre is the empowerment of individuals and entire communities by reigniting a sense of mutual pride that is fast diminishing. Over the years, he has developed a unique and vast body of work that relies heavily on team spirit and collaboration, often produced with a team of artists under the banner of Navin Production, a studio he founded in 1994.

For the eighth edition of Art Dubai, Rawanchaikul will present Postcards from Dubai, a new body of works specially commissioned by Yavuz Fine Art. Based on the artist's incursions into Dubai and in-depth interviews with its residents during that time, Postcards from Dubai explores aspects of the city's cultural heritage, community and identity, in light of its rapid-fire development from a fishing village to an affluent metropolis.

At the centre of Postcards from Dubai are three large-scale billboard-style paintings that gather a colourful cast of real-life characters into panoramic group portraits. The son of Indian immigrants from the Punjab region of present-day Pakistan, Rawanchaikul focuses here on the South Asian immigrant community that makes up the city's majority: the long-time residents and transient workers; fishermen, tailors, construction workers, taxi drivers. Alongside historical figures from Dubai's past taken from archival images, these figures pose before a patchwork background, painted to resemble a collage of the eponymous postcards from Dubai, assembled together to create a mixed cityscape of sepia-hued historic landmarks such as the Dubai Museum, beside shiny, technicolour skyscrapers like the Burj Khalifa. These fanciful projections invoke the past and present, with implications for the future; pay tribute to Dubai's multi-cultural identity; and unfurl universal metaphors for the common threads that bind us.

Complementing the paintings are video interviews with those featured in the paintings. As they share their stories and memories with the artist and viewers, these longtime residents – most of them shopkeepers and merchants at Dubai's old marketplace who have witnessed the dramatic changes over the years – provide an oral history of the city.

-Yavuz Fine Art

Image: © Navin Rawanchaikul
Courtesy of the artist and Yavuz Fine Art