“One has to place the world in the subject, so that the subject is for the world.”
- Gilles Deleuze

In a universe of collaborations, what are the collaborative matters? Or rather what kind of collaborations can be made to matter? At its most significant, artistic collaboration can be defined as stemming more from a keen consent to empower the act of liberation and multiplication between those involved. Which, ultimately, lead us into the notion of the mutable nature in artistic identity itself.

An encounter initially stemmed from a day spent between artists Nico Dockx and Rirkrit Tiravanija, tracing each other’s practices, subjecting upon the world they engage in and set upon an ongoing experience in addressing the inter-changing mechanisms of authorship, media historicization and questioning art presentation as a static and unalterable configuration.

Beginning with selecting a news photo of a street demonstration, leading to the making of a drawing of the photo, before bringing upon the process of precise removal of the subject by the act of erasing the drawing over an intermittent period of time. Sound recordings have also been produced from these dual acts of aestheticizing and obliterating of an image that is most relevant to the time and location that this collaboration first took place – on the very day that Bangkok was being cleaned up after weeks of unrest and political upheavals.

By the very action of the artists’ teamed process, an organic dialogue is unavoidable concerning the transitory nature of overlapping shifts. There is the hybridity of which something new, created by the mixture of presence and absence, co-exists to generate a collaborative dynamic that interconnects, reflecting a nature in which the artists accept the individuality of each other with openness and shared inspiration.

This exhibition operates on many levels by being appropriative to the dimensional elements into how the situation and subject of art could be layered into one motivating expression, such as the timing of the exhibition. What will end through the expression of drawing in a solo project by Rirkrit Tiravanija reaching its closure is followed immediately in the opening of this exhibition whereby the erasing of the expression, done mindfully over a lengthy – yet unfinished -- period by Nico Dockx, will be channeled through a sound installation. A very visible action witnessed on a daily routine of making drawings in one gallery is then transcended here into an invisible act, aurally experienced only through the voluminous nature of rubbing out a drawing.

In the form of a vinyl record being played continuously, the installation, functions in spatial relations, not only to the gallery but also to what repetitive extent the society keeps experiencing its inner state of anxieties and uncertainties in Thailand.

One of the basic notions of drawing is to document. And the artists have documented a piece of history. A history in an image represented as the current topical situation. And the erasure of the drawn image only serves the readiness to be ready for another history in the making. Indicating that the removal of one subject can allow for the appearance of another.

History keeps repeating itself.

The extension of drawing and erasing by the artists propagate that further.