Artist Interview: Jakkai Siributr on stitching place and time
We speak with one of Southeast Asia’s leading contemporary artists about their first UK institutional exhibition at the Whitworth in Manchester...
February 6, 2025
Jakkai, your textile practice has a real duality, bringing together different, often contrasting elements and identities, whether that be Buddhism and materialism in modern-day life or historical traditions and everyday popular culture in Thailand, where you work and live. At the start of the exhibition at the Whitworth, we see Sompong (2023), which draws together antique Burmese Kalang embroidery and machine-mass-produced lace. Next to it, there's Airborne (Klongtoey) (2022), composed of COVID face masks and reconstructed uniforms. Can you talk about the Outworn series and the Phayao-a-Porter project from which they come?
Outworn and Phayao-a-Porter were both products of the pandemic. Many of my planned exhibitions were postponed or cancelled, so to keep my assistants working full-time, I had to find some projects for them. I could shop online and buy all these second-hand garments and clothes. I started designing embroidery patterns on these old, vintage jackets, and when I wore them, people noticed, so I started taking commissions.
During that time, I also reached out to these women in Phayao, who I used to work with when looking for additional seamstresses and dressmakers. Phayao is a remote northern province in Thailand that I was fortunate enough to have visited, and I met these women who were then working for a garment factory. When COVID happened, they all lost their jobs, too, so I was always looking for a way to help them. With this project, I could give them some kind of temporary employment and 30 per cent of the proceeds of each jacket, which goes back to the community in the form of emergency funds, scholarships, or healthcare. It was a limited series because, after the pandemic, everything resumed with my studio production.
Thailand relies mainly on tourism, so when the country closed down during the lockdown, many people from the tourism industry also lost their jobs. Our government, like any other in the world at the time, didn't know what was happening and mismanaged many situations. People weren't getting the financial assistance that they so desperately needed. One of my assistants lived in a community where many people work in the hotel industry, so I wanted to help them in a very small way.
Outworn came from this idea that one way to help them financially was to buy from them their uniforms that became obsolete. I collected uniforms from taxi drivers, hotel, and spa workers, disassembled them, and stitched them into large tapestries. These pieces are embellished with talismanic objects to convey that, after all this time, we seem to forget that many of these people still suffer from the pandemic. They rely on supernatural powers and go to temples for healing, protection, and prosperity because they still cannot rely on their governments.
It also makes me think of the healing potential of embroidery; another artist, Alia Farid, who makes tapestries with Palestinian diasporic communities, speaks of using chain stitching to reinforce communities, often subjugated by political circumstances. I notice how your works also seek to challenge singular media representations. In Changing Room (2017), you explore the binary between Muslims and the Buddhist Thai army on the southern border regions. You are based between Bangkok and Chiangmai. How does this travel, between the capital on the south coast and the mountainous north, and these different cities and contexts, shape your practice?
When I returned to Thailand after university and graduate school [in the United States], my first job was teaching at Thammasat University [in Thailand]. They had just started their textile art program, so I co-founded the Department of Textile and Fashion Design in the Faculty of Fine Arts. Part of the curriculum was that we had to take students on field trips each term to visit remote, weaving villages. It was an introduction back to Thailand because I had been away for almost ten years. I was fifteen when I left, so coming back at 25, I realised there were many things I didn't know. So that was an eye-opening experience for me, too.
We visited the Deep South of Thailand, the three provinces with a border with Malaysia. These trips stopped in the early 2000s because sectarian violence erupted. Here, the majority of the population are ethnic Malay Muslims, but because they live in Thailand, they are a minority in a predominantly Buddhist country.
I didn't return to that area until 2016, on a trip organised by the authorities. When I returned, I talked to many people and saw many things differently from sixteen years before. There were a lot more checkpoints. But even then, I realised these places were not as dangerous as portrayed in the media. When I came back, I wanted the rest of Thailand to know about the situation in the area as well.
Changing Room was a result of that particular trip. It's a work that needs to be activated by the audience. I invite them to try on these military jackets and the Muslim skullcaps (songkoks), which have been embellished with images of violence taken from the internet, to look themselves in the mirror, take a selfie, and post on social media because we're in this selfie-obsessed world. When they look back at the photos, I hope they will start to notice these images on the jackets, ask questions, and want to know more about the situation.
Military jackets and skullcaps have different connotations for different communities. For example, an army jacket means security and safety to a Buddhist, whereas to the Muslim community, it means the total opposite: threat and danger. The same goes for the skull caps traditionally worn by Muslim men, which attract a lot of suspicion from the authorities and mean they often get stopped, searched, and harassed.
This participation also reflects how textiles can often embody lived experience. In other works, you explore double meanings and Thailand's political complexities through your connections between your family and the royal courts of Kings Rama VII (1926-35) and Rama IX (1946-2016). Could you discuss some of those entanglements between these personal and national stories?
The three works from the Matrilineal series (2023) deal with how personal stories intersect with national history. They are a tribute to all the women I grew up with: my mother, my aunt, and my grandmother. Specific incidents in Thai history during that period deeply impacted their lives.
For example, in 1932, when Thailand went from an absolute monarchy to a constitutional monarchy, King Rama VII abdicated and lived in exile in the UK until his death. My grandparents had to accompany the king and were only allowed to bring two of their daughters, so they had to leave the other two behind. My mother, four months old, and my aunt were left behind in Thailand, while the other two sisters moved here [to the UK].
They had not reunited for twelve years, during which many things happened: World War II, King Rama VII's and VIII's deaths. The work speaks to their lives, but most importantly, even though these stories are particular to these women, they also have a universal theme because everybody has their stories to tell. Stories become memories which, like old photographs, will fade away one day, and I often contemplate how we pass on these memories to the next generation. How do we keep retelling these stories?
Thailand is also one of the countries in the Asian region where history is often rewritten or sometimes even erased. And so I think it's important to tell these stories. So Sompong also talks about this particular incident in Thai history that we're not allowed to speak about. One of my mother's great-uncles was a royal page to Rama VIII. When the King was found dead with a bullet hole in his head, he and his two other colleagues became scapegoats and executed. So, after the execution, my great-grandmother brought in his widow and seven daughters to live with us in the compound in Bangkok.
I grew up with these women, whom I refer to as aunties. I saw how they suffered, were ostracised and bullied. Going to school, people would say, your father killed the King, and so on. Sompong is the eldest daughter's name, and she seemed to have great opportunities. She studied abroad and worked at different embassies in Thailand. But I think the stigma that she carried with her in life was just too much, and so she shot herself. So, deep down, these works are about memory, loss, and grief.
The work includes a Burmese embroidery that once belonged to her and was passed on to me by her remaining sisters. I didn't know what to do with it until I worked on this exhibition [in Manchester]. The scene usually depicts princes or kings from the Ramayana tales. I decided to turn this image upside down and cover it with black feathers to represent the black clouds of this tragic incident that still hover over us to this day.
You draw on these entangled histories, not just in the context of Thailand but also in northern England. These themes resound particularly here in Manchester and at the Whitworth, which has held exhibitions of Althea McNish, Ayo Akingbade (with plane-printed motifs), and Palestinian embroidery, curated by Rachel Dedman, who also co-curated the 2024 State of Fashion Biennial in the Netherlands, in which you took part. Your exhibition here includes a direct intervention in the gallery space, part of your long-term project, There's No Place. Can you talk about this collaborative embroidery piece and how it highlights our entanglements in global histories and contemporary political and social realities, too?
In 2019, I went to the border between Thailand and Myanmar in the northern province of Chiangmai. I spent a weekend in storytelling workshops with kids from the Shan ethnic minority group who had been born in this [Koung Jor Shan] refugee camp. We explored their hopes, their dream jobs, and their cultural heritage.
Most of the kids in this refugee camp were stateless. They were born to Burmese parents, but because they were born in Thailand, often in the village or in an orchard where their parents worked, they were not correctly registered. They're not Thai or Burmese, and although the kids can enrol in Thai schools and study as much as they want, the prospects of finding proper jobs are bleak simply because they don't have any legal documents. So often, they fall through the cracks and get exploited. Before that weekend, I didn't realise the extent of the situation of statelessness or protracted refugee situations, where they're stuck in one place and are not trying to move to any other country.
I had this idea to make embroidery patches with the kids to raise awareness in Thailand. Then, I decided I wanted to invite the public to dialogue with the stateless community. In my workshops, the public is invited to embroider on the same pieces touched and stitched by the stainless community. As much as the public may not want to know about these situations, they can’t deny them because they're working on the same fabric that these people have touched.
The stateless Shan community does the colourful parts, while the public is only allowed to use monochrome, black, grey, and white yarns. And that is just to restrict the public, who, daily, have so many, too many, choices to make and to emphasise the fact that there are people just like us with the same dreams, ambitions, and hopes, but their lives are more limited.
Jakkai Siributr: There's no Place is on view at the Whitworth in Manchester until 16 March 2025.
A concurrent solo exhibition of Jakkai Siributr’s work is on view at Flowers Gallery in London until 8 February 2025.
Jakkai, your textile practice has a real duality, bringing together different, often contrasting elements and identities, whether that be Buddhism and materialism in modern-day life or historical traditions and everyday popular culture in Thailand, where you work and live. At the start of the exhibition at the Whitworth, we see Sompong (2023), which draws together antique Burmese Kalang embroidery and machine-mass-produced lace. Next to it, there's Airborne (Klongtoey) (2022), composed of COVID face masks and reconstructed uniforms. Can you talk about the Outworn series and the Phayao-a-Porter project from which they come?
Outworn and Phayao-a-Porter were both products of the pandemic. Many of my planned exhibitions were postponed or cancelled, so to keep my assistants working full-time, I had to find some projects for them. I could shop online and buy all these second-hand garments and clothes. I started designing embroidery patterns on these old, vintage jackets, and when I wore them, people noticed, so I started taking commissions.
During that time, I also reached out to these women in Phayao, who I used to work with when looking for additional seamstresses and dressmakers. Phayao is a remote northern province in Thailand that I was fortunate enough to have visited, and I met these women who were then working for a garment factory. When COVID happened, they all lost their jobs, too, so I was always looking for a way to help them. With this project, I could give them some kind of temporary employment and 30 per cent of the proceeds of each jacket, which goes back to the community in the form of emergency funds, scholarships, or healthcare. It was a limited series because, after the pandemic, everything resumed with my studio production.
Thailand relies mainly on tourism, so when the country closed down during the lockdown, many people from the tourism industry also lost their jobs. Our government, like any other in the world at the time, didn't know what was happening and mismanaged many situations. People weren't getting the financial assistance that they so desperately needed. One of my assistants lived in a community where many people work in the hotel industry, so I wanted to help them in a very small way.
Outworn came from this idea that one way to help them financially was to buy from them their uniforms that became obsolete. I collected uniforms from taxi drivers, hotel, and spa workers, disassembled them, and stitched them into large tapestries. These pieces are embellished with talismanic objects to convey that, after all this time, we seem to forget that many of these people still suffer from the pandemic. They rely on supernatural powers and go to temples for healing, protection, and prosperity because they still cannot rely on their governments.
It also makes me think of the healing potential of embroidery; another artist, Alia Farid, who makes tapestries with Palestinian diasporic communities, speaks of using chain stitching to reinforce communities, often subjugated by political circumstances. I notice how your works also seek to challenge singular media representations. In Changing Room (2017), you explore the binary between Muslims and the Buddhist Thai army on the southern border regions. You are based between Bangkok and Chiangmai. How does this travel, between the capital on the south coast and the mountainous north, and these different cities and contexts, shape your practice?
When I returned to Thailand after university and graduate school [in the United States], my first job was teaching at Thammasat University [in Thailand]. They had just started their textile art program, so I co-founded the Department of Textile and Fashion Design in the Faculty of Fine Arts. Part of the curriculum was that we had to take students on field trips each term to visit remote, weaving villages. It was an introduction back to Thailand because I had been away for almost ten years. I was fifteen when I left, so coming back at 25, I realised there were many things I didn't know. So that was an eye-opening experience for me, too.
We visited the Deep South of Thailand, the three provinces with a border with Malaysia. These trips stopped in the early 2000s because sectarian violence erupted. Here, the majority of the population are ethnic Malay Muslims, but because they live in Thailand, they are a minority in a predominantly Buddhist country.
I didn't return to that area until 2016, on a trip organised by the authorities. When I returned, I talked to many people and saw many things differently from sixteen years before. There were a lot more checkpoints. But even then, I realised these places were not as dangerous as portrayed in the media. When I came back, I wanted the rest of Thailand to know about the situation in the area as well.
Changing Room was a result of that particular trip. It's a work that needs to be activated by the audience. I invite them to try on these military jackets and the Muslim skullcaps (songkoks), which have been embellished with images of violence taken from the internet, to look themselves in the mirror, take a selfie, and post on social media because we're in this selfie-obsessed world. When they look back at the photos, I hope they will start to notice these images on the jackets, ask questions, and want to know more about the situation.
Military jackets and skullcaps have different connotations for different communities. For example, an army jacket means security and safety to a Buddhist, whereas to the Muslim community, it means the total opposite: threat and danger. The same goes for the skull caps traditionally worn by Muslim men, which attract a lot of suspicion from the authorities and mean they often get stopped, searched, and harassed.
This participation also reflects how textiles can often embody lived experience. In other works, you explore double meanings and Thailand's political complexities through your connections between your family and the royal courts of Kings Rama VII (1926-35) and Rama IX (1946-2016). Could you discuss some of those entanglements between these personal and national stories?
The three works from the Matrilineal series (2023) deal with how personal stories intersect with national history. They are a tribute to all the women I grew up with: my mother, my aunt, and my grandmother. Specific incidents in Thai history during that period deeply impacted their lives.
For example, in 1932, when Thailand went from an absolute monarchy to a constitutional monarchy, King Rama VII abdicated and lived in exile in the UK until his death. My grandparents had to accompany the king and were only allowed to bring two of their daughters, so they had to leave the other two behind. My mother, four months old, and my aunt were left behind in Thailand, while the other two sisters moved here [to the UK].
They had not reunited for twelve years, during which many things happened: World War II, King Rama VII's and VIII's deaths. The work speaks to their lives, but most importantly, even though these stories are particular to these women, they also have a universal theme because everybody has their stories to tell. Stories become memories which, like old photographs, will fade away one day, and I often contemplate how we pass on these memories to the next generation. How do we keep retelling these stories?
Thailand is also one of the countries in the Asian region where history is often rewritten or sometimes even erased. And so I think it's important to tell these stories. So Sompong also talks about this particular incident in Thai history that we're not allowed to speak about. One of my mother's great-uncles was a royal page to Rama VIII. When the King was found dead with a bullet hole in his head, he and his two other colleagues became scapegoats and executed. So, after the execution, my great-grandmother brought in his widow and seven daughters to live with us in the compound in Bangkok.
I grew up with these women, whom I refer to as aunties. I saw how they suffered, were ostracised and bullied. Going to school, people would say, your father killed the King, and so on. Sompong is the eldest daughter's name, and she seemed to have great opportunities. She studied abroad and worked at different embassies in Thailand. But I think the stigma that she carried with her in life was just too much, and so she shot herself. So, deep down, these works are about memory, loss, and grief.
The work includes a Burmese embroidery that once belonged to her and was passed on to me by her remaining sisters. I didn't know what to do with it until I worked on this exhibition [in Manchester]. The scene usually depicts princes or kings from the Ramayana tales. I decided to turn this image upside down and cover it with black feathers to represent the black clouds of this tragic incident that still hover over us to this day.
You draw on these entangled histories, not just in the context of Thailand but also in northern England. These themes resound particularly here in Manchester and at the Whitworth, which has held exhibitions of Althea McNish, Ayo Akingbade (with plane-printed motifs), and Palestinian embroidery, curated by Rachel Dedman, who also co-curated the 2024 State of Fashion Biennial in the Netherlands, in which you took part. Your exhibition here includes a direct intervention in the gallery space, part of your long-term project, There's No Place. Can you talk about this collaborative embroidery piece and how it highlights our entanglements in global histories and contemporary political and social realities, too?
In 2019, I went to the border between Thailand and Myanmar in the northern province of Chiangmai. I spent a weekend in storytelling workshops with kids from the Shan ethnic minority group who had been born in this [Koung Jor Shan] refugee camp. We explored their hopes, their dream jobs, and their cultural heritage.
Most of the kids in this refugee camp were stateless. They were born to Burmese parents, but because they were born in Thailand, often in the village or in an orchard where their parents worked, they were not correctly registered. They're not Thai or Burmese, and although the kids can enrol in Thai schools and study as much as they want, the prospects of finding proper jobs are bleak simply because they don't have any legal documents. So often, they fall through the cracks and get exploited. Before that weekend, I didn't realise the extent of the situation of statelessness or protracted refugee situations, where they're stuck in one place and are not trying to move to any other country.
I had this idea to make embroidery patches with the kids to raise awareness in Thailand. Then, I decided I wanted to invite the public to dialogue with the stateless community. In my workshops, the public is invited to embroider on the same pieces touched and stitched by the stainless community. As much as the public may not want to know about these situations, they can’t deny them because they're working on the same fabric that these people have touched.
The stateless Shan community does the colourful parts, while the public is only allowed to use monochrome, black, grey, and white yarns. And that is just to restrict the public, who, daily, have so many, too many, choices to make and to emphasise the fact that there are people just like us with the same dreams, ambitions, and hopes, but their lives are more limited.
Jakkai Siributr: There's no Place is on view at the Whitworth in Manchester until 16 March 2025.
A concurrent solo exhibition of Jakkai Siributr’s work is on view at Flowers Gallery in London until 8 February 2025.
Jakkai, your textile practice has a real duality, bringing together different, often contrasting elements and identities, whether that be Buddhism and materialism in modern-day life or historical traditions and everyday popular culture in Thailand, where you work and live. At the start of the exhibition at the Whitworth, we see Sompong (2023), which draws together antique Burmese Kalang embroidery and machine-mass-produced lace. Next to it, there's Airborne (Klongtoey) (2022), composed of COVID face masks and reconstructed uniforms. Can you talk about the Outworn series and the Phayao-a-Porter project from which they come?
Outworn and Phayao-a-Porter were both products of the pandemic. Many of my planned exhibitions were postponed or cancelled, so to keep my assistants working full-time, I had to find some projects for them. I could shop online and buy all these second-hand garments and clothes. I started designing embroidery patterns on these old, vintage jackets, and when I wore them, people noticed, so I started taking commissions.
During that time, I also reached out to these women in Phayao, who I used to work with when looking for additional seamstresses and dressmakers. Phayao is a remote northern province in Thailand that I was fortunate enough to have visited, and I met these women who were then working for a garment factory. When COVID happened, they all lost their jobs, too, so I was always looking for a way to help them. With this project, I could give them some kind of temporary employment and 30 per cent of the proceeds of each jacket, which goes back to the community in the form of emergency funds, scholarships, or healthcare. It was a limited series because, after the pandemic, everything resumed with my studio production.
Thailand relies mainly on tourism, so when the country closed down during the lockdown, many people from the tourism industry also lost their jobs. Our government, like any other in the world at the time, didn't know what was happening and mismanaged many situations. People weren't getting the financial assistance that they so desperately needed. One of my assistants lived in a community where many people work in the hotel industry, so I wanted to help them in a very small way.
Outworn came from this idea that one way to help them financially was to buy from them their uniforms that became obsolete. I collected uniforms from taxi drivers, hotel, and spa workers, disassembled them, and stitched them into large tapestries. These pieces are embellished with talismanic objects to convey that, after all this time, we seem to forget that many of these people still suffer from the pandemic. They rely on supernatural powers and go to temples for healing, protection, and prosperity because they still cannot rely on their governments.
It also makes me think of the healing potential of embroidery; another artist, Alia Farid, who makes tapestries with Palestinian diasporic communities, speaks of using chain stitching to reinforce communities, often subjugated by political circumstances. I notice how your works also seek to challenge singular media representations. In Changing Room (2017), you explore the binary between Muslims and the Buddhist Thai army on the southern border regions. You are based between Bangkok and Chiangmai. How does this travel, between the capital on the south coast and the mountainous north, and these different cities and contexts, shape your practice?
When I returned to Thailand after university and graduate school [in the United States], my first job was teaching at Thammasat University [in Thailand]. They had just started their textile art program, so I co-founded the Department of Textile and Fashion Design in the Faculty of Fine Arts. Part of the curriculum was that we had to take students on field trips each term to visit remote, weaving villages. It was an introduction back to Thailand because I had been away for almost ten years. I was fifteen when I left, so coming back at 25, I realised there were many things I didn't know. So that was an eye-opening experience for me, too.
We visited the Deep South of Thailand, the three provinces with a border with Malaysia. These trips stopped in the early 2000s because sectarian violence erupted. Here, the majority of the population are ethnic Malay Muslims, but because they live in Thailand, they are a minority in a predominantly Buddhist country.
I didn't return to that area until 2016, on a trip organised by the authorities. When I returned, I talked to many people and saw many things differently from sixteen years before. There were a lot more checkpoints. But even then, I realised these places were not as dangerous as portrayed in the media. When I came back, I wanted the rest of Thailand to know about the situation in the area as well.
Changing Room was a result of that particular trip. It's a work that needs to be activated by the audience. I invite them to try on these military jackets and the Muslim skullcaps (songkoks), which have been embellished with images of violence taken from the internet, to look themselves in the mirror, take a selfie, and post on social media because we're in this selfie-obsessed world. When they look back at the photos, I hope they will start to notice these images on the jackets, ask questions, and want to know more about the situation.
Military jackets and skullcaps have different connotations for different communities. For example, an army jacket means security and safety to a Buddhist, whereas to the Muslim community, it means the total opposite: threat and danger. The same goes for the skull caps traditionally worn by Muslim men, which attract a lot of suspicion from the authorities and mean they often get stopped, searched, and harassed.
This participation also reflects how textiles can often embody lived experience. In other works, you explore double meanings and Thailand's political complexities through your connections between your family and the royal courts of Kings Rama VII (1926-35) and Rama IX (1946-2016). Could you discuss some of those entanglements between these personal and national stories?
The three works from the Matrilineal series (2023) deal with how personal stories intersect with national history. They are a tribute to all the women I grew up with: my mother, my aunt, and my grandmother. Specific incidents in Thai history during that period deeply impacted their lives.
For example, in 1932, when Thailand went from an absolute monarchy to a constitutional monarchy, King Rama VII abdicated and lived in exile in the UK until his death. My grandparents had to accompany the king and were only allowed to bring two of their daughters, so they had to leave the other two behind. My mother, four months old, and my aunt were left behind in Thailand, while the other two sisters moved here [to the UK].
They had not reunited for twelve years, during which many things happened: World War II, King Rama VII's and VIII's deaths. The work speaks to their lives, but most importantly, even though these stories are particular to these women, they also have a universal theme because everybody has their stories to tell. Stories become memories which, like old photographs, will fade away one day, and I often contemplate how we pass on these memories to the next generation. How do we keep retelling these stories?
Thailand is also one of the countries in the Asian region where history is often rewritten or sometimes even erased. And so I think it's important to tell these stories. So Sompong also talks about this particular incident in Thai history that we're not allowed to speak about. One of my mother's great-uncles was a royal page to Rama VIII. When the King was found dead with a bullet hole in his head, he and his two other colleagues became scapegoats and executed. So, after the execution, my great-grandmother brought in his widow and seven daughters to live with us in the compound in Bangkok.
I grew up with these women, whom I refer to as aunties. I saw how they suffered, were ostracised and bullied. Going to school, people would say, your father killed the King, and so on. Sompong is the eldest daughter's name, and she seemed to have great opportunities. She studied abroad and worked at different embassies in Thailand. But I think the stigma that she carried with her in life was just too much, and so she shot herself. So, deep down, these works are about memory, loss, and grief.
The work includes a Burmese embroidery that once belonged to her and was passed on to me by her remaining sisters. I didn't know what to do with it until I worked on this exhibition [in Manchester]. The scene usually depicts princes or kings from the Ramayana tales. I decided to turn this image upside down and cover it with black feathers to represent the black clouds of this tragic incident that still hover over us to this day.
You draw on these entangled histories, not just in the context of Thailand but also in northern England. These themes resound particularly here in Manchester and at the Whitworth, which has held exhibitions of Althea McNish, Ayo Akingbade (with plane-printed motifs), and Palestinian embroidery, curated by Rachel Dedman, who also co-curated the 2024 State of Fashion Biennial in the Netherlands, in which you took part. Your exhibition here includes a direct intervention in the gallery space, part of your long-term project, There's No Place. Can you talk about this collaborative embroidery piece and how it highlights our entanglements in global histories and contemporary political and social realities, too?
In 2019, I went to the border between Thailand and Myanmar in the northern province of Chiangmai. I spent a weekend in storytelling workshops with kids from the Shan ethnic minority group who had been born in this [Koung Jor Shan] refugee camp. We explored their hopes, their dream jobs, and their cultural heritage.
Most of the kids in this refugee camp were stateless. They were born to Burmese parents, but because they were born in Thailand, often in the village or in an orchard where their parents worked, they were not correctly registered. They're not Thai or Burmese, and although the kids can enrol in Thai schools and study as much as they want, the prospects of finding proper jobs are bleak simply because they don't have any legal documents. So often, they fall through the cracks and get exploited. Before that weekend, I didn't realise the extent of the situation of statelessness or protracted refugee situations, where they're stuck in one place and are not trying to move to any other country.
I had this idea to make embroidery patches with the kids to raise awareness in Thailand. Then, I decided I wanted to invite the public to dialogue with the stateless community. In my workshops, the public is invited to embroider on the same pieces touched and stitched by the stainless community. As much as the public may not want to know about these situations, they can’t deny them because they're working on the same fabric that these people have touched.
The stateless Shan community does the colourful parts, while the public is only allowed to use monochrome, black, grey, and white yarns. And that is just to restrict the public, who, daily, have so many, too many, choices to make and to emphasise the fact that there are people just like us with the same dreams, ambitions, and hopes, but their lives are more limited.
Jakkai Siributr: There's no Place is on view at the Whitworth in Manchester until 16 March 2025.
A concurrent solo exhibition of Jakkai Siributr’s work is on view at Flowers Gallery in London until 8 February 2025.
Jakkai, your textile practice has a real duality, bringing together different, often contrasting elements and identities, whether that be Buddhism and materialism in modern-day life or historical traditions and everyday popular culture in Thailand, where you work and live. At the start of the exhibition at the Whitworth, we see Sompong (2023), which draws together antique Burmese Kalang embroidery and machine-mass-produced lace. Next to it, there's Airborne (Klongtoey) (2022), composed of COVID face masks and reconstructed uniforms. Can you talk about the Outworn series and the Phayao-a-Porter project from which they come?
Outworn and Phayao-a-Porter were both products of the pandemic. Many of my planned exhibitions were postponed or cancelled, so to keep my assistants working full-time, I had to find some projects for them. I could shop online and buy all these second-hand garments and clothes. I started designing embroidery patterns on these old, vintage jackets, and when I wore them, people noticed, so I started taking commissions.
During that time, I also reached out to these women in Phayao, who I used to work with when looking for additional seamstresses and dressmakers. Phayao is a remote northern province in Thailand that I was fortunate enough to have visited, and I met these women who were then working for a garment factory. When COVID happened, they all lost their jobs, too, so I was always looking for a way to help them. With this project, I could give them some kind of temporary employment and 30 per cent of the proceeds of each jacket, which goes back to the community in the form of emergency funds, scholarships, or healthcare. It was a limited series because, after the pandemic, everything resumed with my studio production.
Thailand relies mainly on tourism, so when the country closed down during the lockdown, many people from the tourism industry also lost their jobs. Our government, like any other in the world at the time, didn't know what was happening and mismanaged many situations. People weren't getting the financial assistance that they so desperately needed. One of my assistants lived in a community where many people work in the hotel industry, so I wanted to help them in a very small way.
Outworn came from this idea that one way to help them financially was to buy from them their uniforms that became obsolete. I collected uniforms from taxi drivers, hotel, and spa workers, disassembled them, and stitched them into large tapestries. These pieces are embellished with talismanic objects to convey that, after all this time, we seem to forget that many of these people still suffer from the pandemic. They rely on supernatural powers and go to temples for healing, protection, and prosperity because they still cannot rely on their governments.
It also makes me think of the healing potential of embroidery; another artist, Alia Farid, who makes tapestries with Palestinian diasporic communities, speaks of using chain stitching to reinforce communities, often subjugated by political circumstances. I notice how your works also seek to challenge singular media representations. In Changing Room (2017), you explore the binary between Muslims and the Buddhist Thai army on the southern border regions. You are based between Bangkok and Chiangmai. How does this travel, between the capital on the south coast and the mountainous north, and these different cities and contexts, shape your practice?
When I returned to Thailand after university and graduate school [in the United States], my first job was teaching at Thammasat University [in Thailand]. They had just started their textile art program, so I co-founded the Department of Textile and Fashion Design in the Faculty of Fine Arts. Part of the curriculum was that we had to take students on field trips each term to visit remote, weaving villages. It was an introduction back to Thailand because I had been away for almost ten years. I was fifteen when I left, so coming back at 25, I realised there were many things I didn't know. So that was an eye-opening experience for me, too.
We visited the Deep South of Thailand, the three provinces with a border with Malaysia. These trips stopped in the early 2000s because sectarian violence erupted. Here, the majority of the population are ethnic Malay Muslims, but because they live in Thailand, they are a minority in a predominantly Buddhist country.
I didn't return to that area until 2016, on a trip organised by the authorities. When I returned, I talked to many people and saw many things differently from sixteen years before. There were a lot more checkpoints. But even then, I realised these places were not as dangerous as portrayed in the media. When I came back, I wanted the rest of Thailand to know about the situation in the area as well.
Changing Room was a result of that particular trip. It's a work that needs to be activated by the audience. I invite them to try on these military jackets and the Muslim skullcaps (songkoks), which have been embellished with images of violence taken from the internet, to look themselves in the mirror, take a selfie, and post on social media because we're in this selfie-obsessed world. When they look back at the photos, I hope they will start to notice these images on the jackets, ask questions, and want to know more about the situation.
Military jackets and skullcaps have different connotations for different communities. For example, an army jacket means security and safety to a Buddhist, whereas to the Muslim community, it means the total opposite: threat and danger. The same goes for the skull caps traditionally worn by Muslim men, which attract a lot of suspicion from the authorities and mean they often get stopped, searched, and harassed.
This participation also reflects how textiles can often embody lived experience. In other works, you explore double meanings and Thailand's political complexities through your connections between your family and the royal courts of Kings Rama VII (1926-35) and Rama IX (1946-2016). Could you discuss some of those entanglements between these personal and national stories?
The three works from the Matrilineal series (2023) deal with how personal stories intersect with national history. They are a tribute to all the women I grew up with: my mother, my aunt, and my grandmother. Specific incidents in Thai history during that period deeply impacted their lives.
For example, in 1932, when Thailand went from an absolute monarchy to a constitutional monarchy, King Rama VII abdicated and lived in exile in the UK until his death. My grandparents had to accompany the king and were only allowed to bring two of their daughters, so they had to leave the other two behind. My mother, four months old, and my aunt were left behind in Thailand, while the other two sisters moved here [to the UK].
They had not reunited for twelve years, during which many things happened: World War II, King Rama VII's and VIII's deaths. The work speaks to their lives, but most importantly, even though these stories are particular to these women, they also have a universal theme because everybody has their stories to tell. Stories become memories which, like old photographs, will fade away one day, and I often contemplate how we pass on these memories to the next generation. How do we keep retelling these stories?
Thailand is also one of the countries in the Asian region where history is often rewritten or sometimes even erased. And so I think it's important to tell these stories. So Sompong also talks about this particular incident in Thai history that we're not allowed to speak about. One of my mother's great-uncles was a royal page to Rama VIII. When the King was found dead with a bullet hole in his head, he and his two other colleagues became scapegoats and executed. So, after the execution, my great-grandmother brought in his widow and seven daughters to live with us in the compound in Bangkok.
I grew up with these women, whom I refer to as aunties. I saw how they suffered, were ostracised and bullied. Going to school, people would say, your father killed the King, and so on. Sompong is the eldest daughter's name, and she seemed to have great opportunities. She studied abroad and worked at different embassies in Thailand. But I think the stigma that she carried with her in life was just too much, and so she shot herself. So, deep down, these works are about memory, loss, and grief.
The work includes a Burmese embroidery that once belonged to her and was passed on to me by her remaining sisters. I didn't know what to do with it until I worked on this exhibition [in Manchester]. The scene usually depicts princes or kings from the Ramayana tales. I decided to turn this image upside down and cover it with black feathers to represent the black clouds of this tragic incident that still hover over us to this day.
You draw on these entangled histories, not just in the context of Thailand but also in northern England. These themes resound particularly here in Manchester and at the Whitworth, which has held exhibitions of Althea McNish, Ayo Akingbade (with plane-printed motifs), and Palestinian embroidery, curated by Rachel Dedman, who also co-curated the 2024 State of Fashion Biennial in the Netherlands, in which you took part. Your exhibition here includes a direct intervention in the gallery space, part of your long-term project, There's No Place. Can you talk about this collaborative embroidery piece and how it highlights our entanglements in global histories and contemporary political and social realities, too?
In 2019, I went to the border between Thailand and Myanmar in the northern province of Chiangmai. I spent a weekend in storytelling workshops with kids from the Shan ethnic minority group who had been born in this [Koung Jor Shan] refugee camp. We explored their hopes, their dream jobs, and their cultural heritage.
Most of the kids in this refugee camp were stateless. They were born to Burmese parents, but because they were born in Thailand, often in the village or in an orchard where their parents worked, they were not correctly registered. They're not Thai or Burmese, and although the kids can enrol in Thai schools and study as much as they want, the prospects of finding proper jobs are bleak simply because they don't have any legal documents. So often, they fall through the cracks and get exploited. Before that weekend, I didn't realise the extent of the situation of statelessness or protracted refugee situations, where they're stuck in one place and are not trying to move to any other country.
I had this idea to make embroidery patches with the kids to raise awareness in Thailand. Then, I decided I wanted to invite the public to dialogue with the stateless community. In my workshops, the public is invited to embroider on the same pieces touched and stitched by the stainless community. As much as the public may not want to know about these situations, they can’t deny them because they're working on the same fabric that these people have touched.
The stateless Shan community does the colourful parts, while the public is only allowed to use monochrome, black, grey, and white yarns. And that is just to restrict the public, who, daily, have so many, too many, choices to make and to emphasise the fact that there are people just like us with the same dreams, ambitions, and hopes, but their lives are more limited.
Jakkai Siributr: There's no Place is on view at the Whitworth in Manchester until 16 March 2025.
A concurrent solo exhibition of Jakkai Siributr’s work is on view at Flowers Gallery in London until 8 February 2025.
Jakkai, your textile practice has a real duality, bringing together different, often contrasting elements and identities, whether that be Buddhism and materialism in modern-day life or historical traditions and everyday popular culture in Thailand, where you work and live. At the start of the exhibition at the Whitworth, we see Sompong (2023), which draws together antique Burmese Kalang embroidery and machine-mass-produced lace. Next to it, there's Airborne (Klongtoey) (2022), composed of COVID face masks and reconstructed uniforms. Can you talk about the Outworn series and the Phayao-a-Porter project from which they come?
Outworn and Phayao-a-Porter were both products of the pandemic. Many of my planned exhibitions were postponed or cancelled, so to keep my assistants working full-time, I had to find some projects for them. I could shop online and buy all these second-hand garments and clothes. I started designing embroidery patterns on these old, vintage jackets, and when I wore them, people noticed, so I started taking commissions.
During that time, I also reached out to these women in Phayao, who I used to work with when looking for additional seamstresses and dressmakers. Phayao is a remote northern province in Thailand that I was fortunate enough to have visited, and I met these women who were then working for a garment factory. When COVID happened, they all lost their jobs, too, so I was always looking for a way to help them. With this project, I could give them some kind of temporary employment and 30 per cent of the proceeds of each jacket, which goes back to the community in the form of emergency funds, scholarships, or healthcare. It was a limited series because, after the pandemic, everything resumed with my studio production.
Thailand relies mainly on tourism, so when the country closed down during the lockdown, many people from the tourism industry also lost their jobs. Our government, like any other in the world at the time, didn't know what was happening and mismanaged many situations. People weren't getting the financial assistance that they so desperately needed. One of my assistants lived in a community where many people work in the hotel industry, so I wanted to help them in a very small way.
Outworn came from this idea that one way to help them financially was to buy from them their uniforms that became obsolete. I collected uniforms from taxi drivers, hotel, and spa workers, disassembled them, and stitched them into large tapestries. These pieces are embellished with talismanic objects to convey that, after all this time, we seem to forget that many of these people still suffer from the pandemic. They rely on supernatural powers and go to temples for healing, protection, and prosperity because they still cannot rely on their governments.
It also makes me think of the healing potential of embroidery; another artist, Alia Farid, who makes tapestries with Palestinian diasporic communities, speaks of using chain stitching to reinforce communities, often subjugated by political circumstances. I notice how your works also seek to challenge singular media representations. In Changing Room (2017), you explore the binary between Muslims and the Buddhist Thai army on the southern border regions. You are based between Bangkok and Chiangmai. How does this travel, between the capital on the south coast and the mountainous north, and these different cities and contexts, shape your practice?
When I returned to Thailand after university and graduate school [in the United States], my first job was teaching at Thammasat University [in Thailand]. They had just started their textile art program, so I co-founded the Department of Textile and Fashion Design in the Faculty of Fine Arts. Part of the curriculum was that we had to take students on field trips each term to visit remote, weaving villages. It was an introduction back to Thailand because I had been away for almost ten years. I was fifteen when I left, so coming back at 25, I realised there were many things I didn't know. So that was an eye-opening experience for me, too.
We visited the Deep South of Thailand, the three provinces with a border with Malaysia. These trips stopped in the early 2000s because sectarian violence erupted. Here, the majority of the population are ethnic Malay Muslims, but because they live in Thailand, they are a minority in a predominantly Buddhist country.
I didn't return to that area until 2016, on a trip organised by the authorities. When I returned, I talked to many people and saw many things differently from sixteen years before. There were a lot more checkpoints. But even then, I realised these places were not as dangerous as portrayed in the media. When I came back, I wanted the rest of Thailand to know about the situation in the area as well.
Changing Room was a result of that particular trip. It's a work that needs to be activated by the audience. I invite them to try on these military jackets and the Muslim skullcaps (songkoks), which have been embellished with images of violence taken from the internet, to look themselves in the mirror, take a selfie, and post on social media because we're in this selfie-obsessed world. When they look back at the photos, I hope they will start to notice these images on the jackets, ask questions, and want to know more about the situation.
Military jackets and skullcaps have different connotations for different communities. For example, an army jacket means security and safety to a Buddhist, whereas to the Muslim community, it means the total opposite: threat and danger. The same goes for the skull caps traditionally worn by Muslim men, which attract a lot of suspicion from the authorities and mean they often get stopped, searched, and harassed.
This participation also reflects how textiles can often embody lived experience. In other works, you explore double meanings and Thailand's political complexities through your connections between your family and the royal courts of Kings Rama VII (1926-35) and Rama IX (1946-2016). Could you discuss some of those entanglements between these personal and national stories?
The three works from the Matrilineal series (2023) deal with how personal stories intersect with national history. They are a tribute to all the women I grew up with: my mother, my aunt, and my grandmother. Specific incidents in Thai history during that period deeply impacted their lives.
For example, in 1932, when Thailand went from an absolute monarchy to a constitutional monarchy, King Rama VII abdicated and lived in exile in the UK until his death. My grandparents had to accompany the king and were only allowed to bring two of their daughters, so they had to leave the other two behind. My mother, four months old, and my aunt were left behind in Thailand, while the other two sisters moved here [to the UK].
They had not reunited for twelve years, during which many things happened: World War II, King Rama VII's and VIII's deaths. The work speaks to their lives, but most importantly, even though these stories are particular to these women, they also have a universal theme because everybody has their stories to tell. Stories become memories which, like old photographs, will fade away one day, and I often contemplate how we pass on these memories to the next generation. How do we keep retelling these stories?
Thailand is also one of the countries in the Asian region where history is often rewritten or sometimes even erased. And so I think it's important to tell these stories. So Sompong also talks about this particular incident in Thai history that we're not allowed to speak about. One of my mother's great-uncles was a royal page to Rama VIII. When the King was found dead with a bullet hole in his head, he and his two other colleagues became scapegoats and executed. So, after the execution, my great-grandmother brought in his widow and seven daughters to live with us in the compound in Bangkok.
I grew up with these women, whom I refer to as aunties. I saw how they suffered, were ostracised and bullied. Going to school, people would say, your father killed the King, and so on. Sompong is the eldest daughter's name, and she seemed to have great opportunities. She studied abroad and worked at different embassies in Thailand. But I think the stigma that she carried with her in life was just too much, and so she shot herself. So, deep down, these works are about memory, loss, and grief.
The work includes a Burmese embroidery that once belonged to her and was passed on to me by her remaining sisters. I didn't know what to do with it until I worked on this exhibition [in Manchester]. The scene usually depicts princes or kings from the Ramayana tales. I decided to turn this image upside down and cover it with black feathers to represent the black clouds of this tragic incident that still hover over us to this day.
You draw on these entangled histories, not just in the context of Thailand but also in northern England. These themes resound particularly here in Manchester and at the Whitworth, which has held exhibitions of Althea McNish, Ayo Akingbade (with plane-printed motifs), and Palestinian embroidery, curated by Rachel Dedman, who also co-curated the 2024 State of Fashion Biennial in the Netherlands, in which you took part. Your exhibition here includes a direct intervention in the gallery space, part of your long-term project, There's No Place. Can you talk about this collaborative embroidery piece and how it highlights our entanglements in global histories and contemporary political and social realities, too?
In 2019, I went to the border between Thailand and Myanmar in the northern province of Chiangmai. I spent a weekend in storytelling workshops with kids from the Shan ethnic minority group who had been born in this [Koung Jor Shan] refugee camp. We explored their hopes, their dream jobs, and their cultural heritage.
Most of the kids in this refugee camp were stateless. They were born to Burmese parents, but because they were born in Thailand, often in the village or in an orchard where their parents worked, they were not correctly registered. They're not Thai or Burmese, and although the kids can enrol in Thai schools and study as much as they want, the prospects of finding proper jobs are bleak simply because they don't have any legal documents. So often, they fall through the cracks and get exploited. Before that weekend, I didn't realise the extent of the situation of statelessness or protracted refugee situations, where they're stuck in one place and are not trying to move to any other country.
I had this idea to make embroidery patches with the kids to raise awareness in Thailand. Then, I decided I wanted to invite the public to dialogue with the stateless community. In my workshops, the public is invited to embroider on the same pieces touched and stitched by the stainless community. As much as the public may not want to know about these situations, they can’t deny them because they're working on the same fabric that these people have touched.
The stateless Shan community does the colourful parts, while the public is only allowed to use monochrome, black, grey, and white yarns. And that is just to restrict the public, who, daily, have so many, too many, choices to make and to emphasise the fact that there are people just like us with the same dreams, ambitions, and hopes, but their lives are more limited.
Jakkai Siributr: There's no Place is on view at the Whitworth in Manchester until 16 March 2025.
A concurrent solo exhibition of Jakkai Siributr’s work is on view at Flowers Gallery in London until 8 February 2025.
Jakkai, your textile practice has a real duality, bringing together different, often contrasting elements and identities, whether that be Buddhism and materialism in modern-day life or historical traditions and everyday popular culture in Thailand, where you work and live. At the start of the exhibition at the Whitworth, we see Sompong (2023), which draws together antique Burmese Kalang embroidery and machine-mass-produced lace. Next to it, there's Airborne (Klongtoey) (2022), composed of COVID face masks and reconstructed uniforms. Can you talk about the Outworn series and the Phayao-a-Porter project from which they come?
Outworn and Phayao-a-Porter were both products of the pandemic. Many of my planned exhibitions were postponed or cancelled, so to keep my assistants working full-time, I had to find some projects for them. I could shop online and buy all these second-hand garments and clothes. I started designing embroidery patterns on these old, vintage jackets, and when I wore them, people noticed, so I started taking commissions.
During that time, I also reached out to these women in Phayao, who I used to work with when looking for additional seamstresses and dressmakers. Phayao is a remote northern province in Thailand that I was fortunate enough to have visited, and I met these women who were then working for a garment factory. When COVID happened, they all lost their jobs, too, so I was always looking for a way to help them. With this project, I could give them some kind of temporary employment and 30 per cent of the proceeds of each jacket, which goes back to the community in the form of emergency funds, scholarships, or healthcare. It was a limited series because, after the pandemic, everything resumed with my studio production.
Thailand relies mainly on tourism, so when the country closed down during the lockdown, many people from the tourism industry also lost their jobs. Our government, like any other in the world at the time, didn't know what was happening and mismanaged many situations. People weren't getting the financial assistance that they so desperately needed. One of my assistants lived in a community where many people work in the hotel industry, so I wanted to help them in a very small way.
Outworn came from this idea that one way to help them financially was to buy from them their uniforms that became obsolete. I collected uniforms from taxi drivers, hotel, and spa workers, disassembled them, and stitched them into large tapestries. These pieces are embellished with talismanic objects to convey that, after all this time, we seem to forget that many of these people still suffer from the pandemic. They rely on supernatural powers and go to temples for healing, protection, and prosperity because they still cannot rely on their governments.
It also makes me think of the healing potential of embroidery; another artist, Alia Farid, who makes tapestries with Palestinian diasporic communities, speaks of using chain stitching to reinforce communities, often subjugated by political circumstances. I notice how your works also seek to challenge singular media representations. In Changing Room (2017), you explore the binary between Muslims and the Buddhist Thai army on the southern border regions. You are based between Bangkok and Chiangmai. How does this travel, between the capital on the south coast and the mountainous north, and these different cities and contexts, shape your practice?
When I returned to Thailand after university and graduate school [in the United States], my first job was teaching at Thammasat University [in Thailand]. They had just started their textile art program, so I co-founded the Department of Textile and Fashion Design in the Faculty of Fine Arts. Part of the curriculum was that we had to take students on field trips each term to visit remote, weaving villages. It was an introduction back to Thailand because I had been away for almost ten years. I was fifteen when I left, so coming back at 25, I realised there were many things I didn't know. So that was an eye-opening experience for me, too.
We visited the Deep South of Thailand, the three provinces with a border with Malaysia. These trips stopped in the early 2000s because sectarian violence erupted. Here, the majority of the population are ethnic Malay Muslims, but because they live in Thailand, they are a minority in a predominantly Buddhist country.
I didn't return to that area until 2016, on a trip organised by the authorities. When I returned, I talked to many people and saw many things differently from sixteen years before. There were a lot more checkpoints. But even then, I realised these places were not as dangerous as portrayed in the media. When I came back, I wanted the rest of Thailand to know about the situation in the area as well.
Changing Room was a result of that particular trip. It's a work that needs to be activated by the audience. I invite them to try on these military jackets and the Muslim skullcaps (songkoks), which have been embellished with images of violence taken from the internet, to look themselves in the mirror, take a selfie, and post on social media because we're in this selfie-obsessed world. When they look back at the photos, I hope they will start to notice these images on the jackets, ask questions, and want to know more about the situation.
Military jackets and skullcaps have different connotations for different communities. For example, an army jacket means security and safety to a Buddhist, whereas to the Muslim community, it means the total opposite: threat and danger. The same goes for the skull caps traditionally worn by Muslim men, which attract a lot of suspicion from the authorities and mean they often get stopped, searched, and harassed.
This participation also reflects how textiles can often embody lived experience. In other works, you explore double meanings and Thailand's political complexities through your connections between your family and the royal courts of Kings Rama VII (1926-35) and Rama IX (1946-2016). Could you discuss some of those entanglements between these personal and national stories?
The three works from the Matrilineal series (2023) deal with how personal stories intersect with national history. They are a tribute to all the women I grew up with: my mother, my aunt, and my grandmother. Specific incidents in Thai history during that period deeply impacted their lives.
For example, in 1932, when Thailand went from an absolute monarchy to a constitutional monarchy, King Rama VII abdicated and lived in exile in the UK until his death. My grandparents had to accompany the king and were only allowed to bring two of their daughters, so they had to leave the other two behind. My mother, four months old, and my aunt were left behind in Thailand, while the other two sisters moved here [to the UK].
They had not reunited for twelve years, during which many things happened: World War II, King Rama VII's and VIII's deaths. The work speaks to their lives, but most importantly, even though these stories are particular to these women, they also have a universal theme because everybody has their stories to tell. Stories become memories which, like old photographs, will fade away one day, and I often contemplate how we pass on these memories to the next generation. How do we keep retelling these stories?
Thailand is also one of the countries in the Asian region where history is often rewritten or sometimes even erased. And so I think it's important to tell these stories. So Sompong also talks about this particular incident in Thai history that we're not allowed to speak about. One of my mother's great-uncles was a royal page to Rama VIII. When the King was found dead with a bullet hole in his head, he and his two other colleagues became scapegoats and executed. So, after the execution, my great-grandmother brought in his widow and seven daughters to live with us in the compound in Bangkok.
I grew up with these women, whom I refer to as aunties. I saw how they suffered, were ostracised and bullied. Going to school, people would say, your father killed the King, and so on. Sompong is the eldest daughter's name, and she seemed to have great opportunities. She studied abroad and worked at different embassies in Thailand. But I think the stigma that she carried with her in life was just too much, and so she shot herself. So, deep down, these works are about memory, loss, and grief.
The work includes a Burmese embroidery that once belonged to her and was passed on to me by her remaining sisters. I didn't know what to do with it until I worked on this exhibition [in Manchester]. The scene usually depicts princes or kings from the Ramayana tales. I decided to turn this image upside down and cover it with black feathers to represent the black clouds of this tragic incident that still hover over us to this day.
You draw on these entangled histories, not just in the context of Thailand but also in northern England. These themes resound particularly here in Manchester and at the Whitworth, which has held exhibitions of Althea McNish, Ayo Akingbade (with plane-printed motifs), and Palestinian embroidery, curated by Rachel Dedman, who also co-curated the 2024 State of Fashion Biennial in the Netherlands, in which you took part. Your exhibition here includes a direct intervention in the gallery space, part of your long-term project, There's No Place. Can you talk about this collaborative embroidery piece and how it highlights our entanglements in global histories and contemporary political and social realities, too?
In 2019, I went to the border between Thailand and Myanmar in the northern province of Chiangmai. I spent a weekend in storytelling workshops with kids from the Shan ethnic minority group who had been born in this [Koung Jor Shan] refugee camp. We explored their hopes, their dream jobs, and their cultural heritage.
Most of the kids in this refugee camp were stateless. They were born to Burmese parents, but because they were born in Thailand, often in the village or in an orchard where their parents worked, they were not correctly registered. They're not Thai or Burmese, and although the kids can enrol in Thai schools and study as much as they want, the prospects of finding proper jobs are bleak simply because they don't have any legal documents. So often, they fall through the cracks and get exploited. Before that weekend, I didn't realise the extent of the situation of statelessness or protracted refugee situations, where they're stuck in one place and are not trying to move to any other country.
I had this idea to make embroidery patches with the kids to raise awareness in Thailand. Then, I decided I wanted to invite the public to dialogue with the stateless community. In my workshops, the public is invited to embroider on the same pieces touched and stitched by the stainless community. As much as the public may not want to know about these situations, they can’t deny them because they're working on the same fabric that these people have touched.
The stateless Shan community does the colourful parts, while the public is only allowed to use monochrome, black, grey, and white yarns. And that is just to restrict the public, who, daily, have so many, too many, choices to make and to emphasise the fact that there are people just like us with the same dreams, ambitions, and hopes, but their lives are more limited.
Jakkai Siributr: There's no Place is on view at the Whitworth in Manchester until 16 March 2025.
A concurrent solo exhibition of Jakkai Siributr’s work is on view at Flowers Gallery in London until 8 February 2025.
Jakkai, your textile practice has a real duality, bringing together different, often contrasting elements and identities, whether that be Buddhism and materialism in modern-day life or historical traditions and everyday popular culture in Thailand, where you work and live. At the start of the exhibition at the Whitworth, we see Sompong (2023), which draws together antique Burmese Kalang embroidery and machine-mass-produced lace. Next to it, there's Airborne (Klongtoey) (2022), composed of COVID face masks and reconstructed uniforms. Can you talk about the Outworn series and the Phayao-a-Porter project from which they come?
Outworn and Phayao-a-Porter were both products of the pandemic. Many of my planned exhibitions were postponed or cancelled, so to keep my assistants working full-time, I had to find some projects for them. I could shop online and buy all these second-hand garments and clothes. I started designing embroidery patterns on these old, vintage jackets, and when I wore them, people noticed, so I started taking commissions.
During that time, I also reached out to these women in Phayao, who I used to work with when looking for additional seamstresses and dressmakers. Phayao is a remote northern province in Thailand that I was fortunate enough to have visited, and I met these women who were then working for a garment factory. When COVID happened, they all lost their jobs, too, so I was always looking for a way to help them. With this project, I could give them some kind of temporary employment and 30 per cent of the proceeds of each jacket, which goes back to the community in the form of emergency funds, scholarships, or healthcare. It was a limited series because, after the pandemic, everything resumed with my studio production.
Thailand relies mainly on tourism, so when the country closed down during the lockdown, many people from the tourism industry also lost their jobs. Our government, like any other in the world at the time, didn't know what was happening and mismanaged many situations. People weren't getting the financial assistance that they so desperately needed. One of my assistants lived in a community where many people work in the hotel industry, so I wanted to help them in a very small way.
Outworn came from this idea that one way to help them financially was to buy from them their uniforms that became obsolete. I collected uniforms from taxi drivers, hotel, and spa workers, disassembled them, and stitched them into large tapestries. These pieces are embellished with talismanic objects to convey that, after all this time, we seem to forget that many of these people still suffer from the pandemic. They rely on supernatural powers and go to temples for healing, protection, and prosperity because they still cannot rely on their governments.
It also makes me think of the healing potential of embroidery; another artist, Alia Farid, who makes tapestries with Palestinian diasporic communities, speaks of using chain stitching to reinforce communities, often subjugated by political circumstances. I notice how your works also seek to challenge singular media representations. In Changing Room (2017), you explore the binary between Muslims and the Buddhist Thai army on the southern border regions. You are based between Bangkok and Chiangmai. How does this travel, between the capital on the south coast and the mountainous north, and these different cities and contexts, shape your practice?
When I returned to Thailand after university and graduate school [in the United States], my first job was teaching at Thammasat University [in Thailand]. They had just started their textile art program, so I co-founded the Department of Textile and Fashion Design in the Faculty of Fine Arts. Part of the curriculum was that we had to take students on field trips each term to visit remote, weaving villages. It was an introduction back to Thailand because I had been away for almost ten years. I was fifteen when I left, so coming back at 25, I realised there were many things I didn't know. So that was an eye-opening experience for me, too.
We visited the Deep South of Thailand, the three provinces with a border with Malaysia. These trips stopped in the early 2000s because sectarian violence erupted. Here, the majority of the population are ethnic Malay Muslims, but because they live in Thailand, they are a minority in a predominantly Buddhist country.
I didn't return to that area until 2016, on a trip organised by the authorities. When I returned, I talked to many people and saw many things differently from sixteen years before. There were a lot more checkpoints. But even then, I realised these places were not as dangerous as portrayed in the media. When I came back, I wanted the rest of Thailand to know about the situation in the area as well.
Changing Room was a result of that particular trip. It's a work that needs to be activated by the audience. I invite them to try on these military jackets and the Muslim skullcaps (songkoks), which have been embellished with images of violence taken from the internet, to look themselves in the mirror, take a selfie, and post on social media because we're in this selfie-obsessed world. When they look back at the photos, I hope they will start to notice these images on the jackets, ask questions, and want to know more about the situation.
Military jackets and skullcaps have different connotations for different communities. For example, an army jacket means security and safety to a Buddhist, whereas to the Muslim community, it means the total opposite: threat and danger. The same goes for the skull caps traditionally worn by Muslim men, which attract a lot of suspicion from the authorities and mean they often get stopped, searched, and harassed.
This participation also reflects how textiles can often embody lived experience. In other works, you explore double meanings and Thailand's political complexities through your connections between your family and the royal courts of Kings Rama VII (1926-35) and Rama IX (1946-2016). Could you discuss some of those entanglements between these personal and national stories?
The three works from the Matrilineal series (2023) deal with how personal stories intersect with national history. They are a tribute to all the women I grew up with: my mother, my aunt, and my grandmother. Specific incidents in Thai history during that period deeply impacted their lives.
For example, in 1932, when Thailand went from an absolute monarchy to a constitutional monarchy, King Rama VII abdicated and lived in exile in the UK until his death. My grandparents had to accompany the king and were only allowed to bring two of their daughters, so they had to leave the other two behind. My mother, four months old, and my aunt were left behind in Thailand, while the other two sisters moved here [to the UK].
They had not reunited for twelve years, during which many things happened: World War II, King Rama VII's and VIII's deaths. The work speaks to their lives, but most importantly, even though these stories are particular to these women, they also have a universal theme because everybody has their stories to tell. Stories become memories which, like old photographs, will fade away one day, and I often contemplate how we pass on these memories to the next generation. How do we keep retelling these stories?
Thailand is also one of the countries in the Asian region where history is often rewritten or sometimes even erased. And so I think it's important to tell these stories. So Sompong also talks about this particular incident in Thai history that we're not allowed to speak about. One of my mother's great-uncles was a royal page to Rama VIII. When the King was found dead with a bullet hole in his head, he and his two other colleagues became scapegoats and executed. So, after the execution, my great-grandmother brought in his widow and seven daughters to live with us in the compound in Bangkok.
I grew up with these women, whom I refer to as aunties. I saw how they suffered, were ostracised and bullied. Going to school, people would say, your father killed the King, and so on. Sompong is the eldest daughter's name, and she seemed to have great opportunities. She studied abroad and worked at different embassies in Thailand. But I think the stigma that she carried with her in life was just too much, and so she shot herself. So, deep down, these works are about memory, loss, and grief.
The work includes a Burmese embroidery that once belonged to her and was passed on to me by her remaining sisters. I didn't know what to do with it until I worked on this exhibition [in Manchester]. The scene usually depicts princes or kings from the Ramayana tales. I decided to turn this image upside down and cover it with black feathers to represent the black clouds of this tragic incident that still hover over us to this day.
You draw on these entangled histories, not just in the context of Thailand but also in northern England. These themes resound particularly here in Manchester and at the Whitworth, which has held exhibitions of Althea McNish, Ayo Akingbade (with plane-printed motifs), and Palestinian embroidery, curated by Rachel Dedman, who also co-curated the 2024 State of Fashion Biennial in the Netherlands, in which you took part. Your exhibition here includes a direct intervention in the gallery space, part of your long-term project, There's No Place. Can you talk about this collaborative embroidery piece and how it highlights our entanglements in global histories and contemporary political and social realities, too?
In 2019, I went to the border between Thailand and Myanmar in the northern province of Chiangmai. I spent a weekend in storytelling workshops with kids from the Shan ethnic minority group who had been born in this [Koung Jor Shan] refugee camp. We explored their hopes, their dream jobs, and their cultural heritage.
Most of the kids in this refugee camp were stateless. They were born to Burmese parents, but because they were born in Thailand, often in the village or in an orchard where their parents worked, they were not correctly registered. They're not Thai or Burmese, and although the kids can enrol in Thai schools and study as much as they want, the prospects of finding proper jobs are bleak simply because they don't have any legal documents. So often, they fall through the cracks and get exploited. Before that weekend, I didn't realise the extent of the situation of statelessness or protracted refugee situations, where they're stuck in one place and are not trying to move to any other country.
I had this idea to make embroidery patches with the kids to raise awareness in Thailand. Then, I decided I wanted to invite the public to dialogue with the stateless community. In my workshops, the public is invited to embroider on the same pieces touched and stitched by the stainless community. As much as the public may not want to know about these situations, they can’t deny them because they're working on the same fabric that these people have touched.
The stateless Shan community does the colourful parts, while the public is only allowed to use monochrome, black, grey, and white yarns. And that is just to restrict the public, who, daily, have so many, too many, choices to make and to emphasise the fact that there are people just like us with the same dreams, ambitions, and hopes, but their lives are more limited.
Jakkai Siributr: There's no Place is on view at the Whitworth in Manchester until 16 March 2025.
A concurrent solo exhibition of Jakkai Siributr’s work is on view at Flowers Gallery in London until 8 February 2025.
Jakkai, your textile practice has a real duality, bringing together different, often contrasting elements and identities, whether that be Buddhism and materialism in modern-day life or historical traditions and everyday popular culture in Thailand, where you work and live. At the start of the exhibition at the Whitworth, we see Sompong (2023), which draws together antique Burmese Kalang embroidery and machine-mass-produced lace. Next to it, there's Airborne (Klongtoey) (2022), composed of COVID face masks and reconstructed uniforms. Can you talk about the Outworn series and the Phayao-a-Porter project from which they come?
Outworn and Phayao-a-Porter were both products of the pandemic. Many of my planned exhibitions were postponed or cancelled, so to keep my assistants working full-time, I had to find some projects for them. I could shop online and buy all these second-hand garments and clothes. I started designing embroidery patterns on these old, vintage jackets, and when I wore them, people noticed, so I started taking commissions.
During that time, I also reached out to these women in Phayao, who I used to work with when looking for additional seamstresses and dressmakers. Phayao is a remote northern province in Thailand that I was fortunate enough to have visited, and I met these women who were then working for a garment factory. When COVID happened, they all lost their jobs, too, so I was always looking for a way to help them. With this project, I could give them some kind of temporary employment and 30 per cent of the proceeds of each jacket, which goes back to the community in the form of emergency funds, scholarships, or healthcare. It was a limited series because, after the pandemic, everything resumed with my studio production.
Thailand relies mainly on tourism, so when the country closed down during the lockdown, many people from the tourism industry also lost their jobs. Our government, like any other in the world at the time, didn't know what was happening and mismanaged many situations. People weren't getting the financial assistance that they so desperately needed. One of my assistants lived in a community where many people work in the hotel industry, so I wanted to help them in a very small way.
Outworn came from this idea that one way to help them financially was to buy from them their uniforms that became obsolete. I collected uniforms from taxi drivers, hotel, and spa workers, disassembled them, and stitched them into large tapestries. These pieces are embellished with talismanic objects to convey that, after all this time, we seem to forget that many of these people still suffer from the pandemic. They rely on supernatural powers and go to temples for healing, protection, and prosperity because they still cannot rely on their governments.
It also makes me think of the healing potential of embroidery; another artist, Alia Farid, who makes tapestries with Palestinian diasporic communities, speaks of using chain stitching to reinforce communities, often subjugated by political circumstances. I notice how your works also seek to challenge singular media representations. In Changing Room (2017), you explore the binary between Muslims and the Buddhist Thai army on the southern border regions. You are based between Bangkok and Chiangmai. How does this travel, between the capital on the south coast and the mountainous north, and these different cities and contexts, shape your practice?
When I returned to Thailand after university and graduate school [in the United States], my first job was teaching at Thammasat University [in Thailand]. They had just started their textile art program, so I co-founded the Department of Textile and Fashion Design in the Faculty of Fine Arts. Part of the curriculum was that we had to take students on field trips each term to visit remote, weaving villages. It was an introduction back to Thailand because I had been away for almost ten years. I was fifteen when I left, so coming back at 25, I realised there were many things I didn't know. So that was an eye-opening experience for me, too.
We visited the Deep South of Thailand, the three provinces with a border with Malaysia. These trips stopped in the early 2000s because sectarian violence erupted. Here, the majority of the population are ethnic Malay Muslims, but because they live in Thailand, they are a minority in a predominantly Buddhist country.
I didn't return to that area until 2016, on a trip organised by the authorities. When I returned, I talked to many people and saw many things differently from sixteen years before. There were a lot more checkpoints. But even then, I realised these places were not as dangerous as portrayed in the media. When I came back, I wanted the rest of Thailand to know about the situation in the area as well.
Changing Room was a result of that particular trip. It's a work that needs to be activated by the audience. I invite them to try on these military jackets and the Muslim skullcaps (songkoks), which have been embellished with images of violence taken from the internet, to look themselves in the mirror, take a selfie, and post on social media because we're in this selfie-obsessed world. When they look back at the photos, I hope they will start to notice these images on the jackets, ask questions, and want to know more about the situation.
Military jackets and skullcaps have different connotations for different communities. For example, an army jacket means security and safety to a Buddhist, whereas to the Muslim community, it means the total opposite: threat and danger. The same goes for the skull caps traditionally worn by Muslim men, which attract a lot of suspicion from the authorities and mean they often get stopped, searched, and harassed.
This participation also reflects how textiles can often embody lived experience. In other works, you explore double meanings and Thailand's political complexities through your connections between your family and the royal courts of Kings Rama VII (1926-35) and Rama IX (1946-2016). Could you discuss some of those entanglements between these personal and national stories?
The three works from the Matrilineal series (2023) deal with how personal stories intersect with national history. They are a tribute to all the women I grew up with: my mother, my aunt, and my grandmother. Specific incidents in Thai history during that period deeply impacted their lives.
For example, in 1932, when Thailand went from an absolute monarchy to a constitutional monarchy, King Rama VII abdicated and lived in exile in the UK until his death. My grandparents had to accompany the king and were only allowed to bring two of their daughters, so they had to leave the other two behind. My mother, four months old, and my aunt were left behind in Thailand, while the other two sisters moved here [to the UK].
They had not reunited for twelve years, during which many things happened: World War II, King Rama VII's and VIII's deaths. The work speaks to their lives, but most importantly, even though these stories are particular to these women, they also have a universal theme because everybody has their stories to tell. Stories become memories which, like old photographs, will fade away one day, and I often contemplate how we pass on these memories to the next generation. How do we keep retelling these stories?
Thailand is also one of the countries in the Asian region where history is often rewritten or sometimes even erased. And so I think it's important to tell these stories. So Sompong also talks about this particular incident in Thai history that we're not allowed to speak about. One of my mother's great-uncles was a royal page to Rama VIII. When the King was found dead with a bullet hole in his head, he and his two other colleagues became scapegoats and executed. So, after the execution, my great-grandmother brought in his widow and seven daughters to live with us in the compound in Bangkok.
I grew up with these women, whom I refer to as aunties. I saw how they suffered, were ostracised and bullied. Going to school, people would say, your father killed the King, and so on. Sompong is the eldest daughter's name, and she seemed to have great opportunities. She studied abroad and worked at different embassies in Thailand. But I think the stigma that she carried with her in life was just too much, and so she shot herself. So, deep down, these works are about memory, loss, and grief.
The work includes a Burmese embroidery that once belonged to her and was passed on to me by her remaining sisters. I didn't know what to do with it until I worked on this exhibition [in Manchester]. The scene usually depicts princes or kings from the Ramayana tales. I decided to turn this image upside down and cover it with black feathers to represent the black clouds of this tragic incident that still hover over us to this day.
You draw on these entangled histories, not just in the context of Thailand but also in northern England. These themes resound particularly here in Manchester and at the Whitworth, which has held exhibitions of Althea McNish, Ayo Akingbade (with plane-printed motifs), and Palestinian embroidery, curated by Rachel Dedman, who also co-curated the 2024 State of Fashion Biennial in the Netherlands, in which you took part. Your exhibition here includes a direct intervention in the gallery space, part of your long-term project, There's No Place. Can you talk about this collaborative embroidery piece and how it highlights our entanglements in global histories and contemporary political and social realities, too?
In 2019, I went to the border between Thailand and Myanmar in the northern province of Chiangmai. I spent a weekend in storytelling workshops with kids from the Shan ethnic minority group who had been born in this [Koung Jor Shan] refugee camp. We explored their hopes, their dream jobs, and their cultural heritage.
Most of the kids in this refugee camp were stateless. They were born to Burmese parents, but because they were born in Thailand, often in the village or in an orchard where their parents worked, they were not correctly registered. They're not Thai or Burmese, and although the kids can enrol in Thai schools and study as much as they want, the prospects of finding proper jobs are bleak simply because they don't have any legal documents. So often, they fall through the cracks and get exploited. Before that weekend, I didn't realise the extent of the situation of statelessness or protracted refugee situations, where they're stuck in one place and are not trying to move to any other country.
I had this idea to make embroidery patches with the kids to raise awareness in Thailand. Then, I decided I wanted to invite the public to dialogue with the stateless community. In my workshops, the public is invited to embroider on the same pieces touched and stitched by the stainless community. As much as the public may not want to know about these situations, they can’t deny them because they're working on the same fabric that these people have touched.
The stateless Shan community does the colourful parts, while the public is only allowed to use monochrome, black, grey, and white yarns. And that is just to restrict the public, who, daily, have so many, too many, choices to make and to emphasise the fact that there are people just like us with the same dreams, ambitions, and hopes, but their lives are more limited.
Jakkai Siributr: There's no Place is on view at the Whitworth in Manchester until 16 March 2025.
A concurrent solo exhibition of Jakkai Siributr’s work is on view at Flowers Gallery in London until 8 February 2025.
Jakkai, your textile practice has a real duality, bringing together different, often contrasting elements and identities, whether that be Buddhism and materialism in modern-day life or historical traditions and everyday popular culture in Thailand, where you work and live. At the start of the exhibition at the Whitworth, we see Sompong (2023), which draws together antique Burmese Kalang embroidery and machine-mass-produced lace. Next to it, there's Airborne (Klongtoey) (2022), composed of COVID face masks and reconstructed uniforms. Can you talk about the Outworn series and the Phayao-a-Porter project from which they come?
Outworn and Phayao-a-Porter were both products of the pandemic. Many of my planned exhibitions were postponed or cancelled, so to keep my assistants working full-time, I had to find some projects for them. I could shop online and buy all these second-hand garments and clothes. I started designing embroidery patterns on these old, vintage jackets, and when I wore them, people noticed, so I started taking commissions.
During that time, I also reached out to these women in Phayao, who I used to work with when looking for additional seamstresses and dressmakers. Phayao is a remote northern province in Thailand that I was fortunate enough to have visited, and I met these women who were then working for a garment factory. When COVID happened, they all lost their jobs, too, so I was always looking for a way to help them. With this project, I could give them some kind of temporary employment and 30 per cent of the proceeds of each jacket, which goes back to the community in the form of emergency funds, scholarships, or healthcare. It was a limited series because, after the pandemic, everything resumed with my studio production.
Thailand relies mainly on tourism, so when the country closed down during the lockdown, many people from the tourism industry also lost their jobs. Our government, like any other in the world at the time, didn't know what was happening and mismanaged many situations. People weren't getting the financial assistance that they so desperately needed. One of my assistants lived in a community where many people work in the hotel industry, so I wanted to help them in a very small way.
Outworn came from this idea that one way to help them financially was to buy from them their uniforms that became obsolete. I collected uniforms from taxi drivers, hotel, and spa workers, disassembled them, and stitched them into large tapestries. These pieces are embellished with talismanic objects to convey that, after all this time, we seem to forget that many of these people still suffer from the pandemic. They rely on supernatural powers and go to temples for healing, protection, and prosperity because they still cannot rely on their governments.
It also makes me think of the healing potential of embroidery; another artist, Alia Farid, who makes tapestries with Palestinian diasporic communities, speaks of using chain stitching to reinforce communities, often subjugated by political circumstances. I notice how your works also seek to challenge singular media representations. In Changing Room (2017), you explore the binary between Muslims and the Buddhist Thai army on the southern border regions. You are based between Bangkok and Chiangmai. How does this travel, between the capital on the south coast and the mountainous north, and these different cities and contexts, shape your practice?
When I returned to Thailand after university and graduate school [in the United States], my first job was teaching at Thammasat University [in Thailand]. They had just started their textile art program, so I co-founded the Department of Textile and Fashion Design in the Faculty of Fine Arts. Part of the curriculum was that we had to take students on field trips each term to visit remote, weaving villages. It was an introduction back to Thailand because I had been away for almost ten years. I was fifteen when I left, so coming back at 25, I realised there were many things I didn't know. So that was an eye-opening experience for me, too.
We visited the Deep South of Thailand, the three provinces with a border with Malaysia. These trips stopped in the early 2000s because sectarian violence erupted. Here, the majority of the population are ethnic Malay Muslims, but because they live in Thailand, they are a minority in a predominantly Buddhist country.
I didn't return to that area until 2016, on a trip organised by the authorities. When I returned, I talked to many people and saw many things differently from sixteen years before. There were a lot more checkpoints. But even then, I realised these places were not as dangerous as portrayed in the media. When I came back, I wanted the rest of Thailand to know about the situation in the area as well.
Changing Room was a result of that particular trip. It's a work that needs to be activated by the audience. I invite them to try on these military jackets and the Muslim skullcaps (songkoks), which have been embellished with images of violence taken from the internet, to look themselves in the mirror, take a selfie, and post on social media because we're in this selfie-obsessed world. When they look back at the photos, I hope they will start to notice these images on the jackets, ask questions, and want to know more about the situation.
Military jackets and skullcaps have different connotations for different communities. For example, an army jacket means security and safety to a Buddhist, whereas to the Muslim community, it means the total opposite: threat and danger. The same goes for the skull caps traditionally worn by Muslim men, which attract a lot of suspicion from the authorities and mean they often get stopped, searched, and harassed.
This participation also reflects how textiles can often embody lived experience. In other works, you explore double meanings and Thailand's political complexities through your connections between your family and the royal courts of Kings Rama VII (1926-35) and Rama IX (1946-2016). Could you discuss some of those entanglements between these personal and national stories?
The three works from the Matrilineal series (2023) deal with how personal stories intersect with national history. They are a tribute to all the women I grew up with: my mother, my aunt, and my grandmother. Specific incidents in Thai history during that period deeply impacted their lives.
For example, in 1932, when Thailand went from an absolute monarchy to a constitutional monarchy, King Rama VII abdicated and lived in exile in the UK until his death. My grandparents had to accompany the king and were only allowed to bring two of their daughters, so they had to leave the other two behind. My mother, four months old, and my aunt were left behind in Thailand, while the other two sisters moved here [to the UK].
They had not reunited for twelve years, during which many things happened: World War II, King Rama VII's and VIII's deaths. The work speaks to their lives, but most importantly, even though these stories are particular to these women, they also have a universal theme because everybody has their stories to tell. Stories become memories which, like old photographs, will fade away one day, and I often contemplate how we pass on these memories to the next generation. How do we keep retelling these stories?
Thailand is also one of the countries in the Asian region where history is often rewritten or sometimes even erased. And so I think it's important to tell these stories. So Sompong also talks about this particular incident in Thai history that we're not allowed to speak about. One of my mother's great-uncles was a royal page to Rama VIII. When the King was found dead with a bullet hole in his head, he and his two other colleagues became scapegoats and executed. So, after the execution, my great-grandmother brought in his widow and seven daughters to live with us in the compound in Bangkok.
I grew up with these women, whom I refer to as aunties. I saw how they suffered, were ostracised and bullied. Going to school, people would say, your father killed the King, and so on. Sompong is the eldest daughter's name, and she seemed to have great opportunities. She studied abroad and worked at different embassies in Thailand. But I think the stigma that she carried with her in life was just too much, and so she shot herself. So, deep down, these works are about memory, loss, and grief.
The work includes a Burmese embroidery that once belonged to her and was passed on to me by her remaining sisters. I didn't know what to do with it until I worked on this exhibition [in Manchester]. The scene usually depicts princes or kings from the Ramayana tales. I decided to turn this image upside down and cover it with black feathers to represent the black clouds of this tragic incident that still hover over us to this day.
You draw on these entangled histories, not just in the context of Thailand but also in northern England. These themes resound particularly here in Manchester and at the Whitworth, which has held exhibitions of Althea McNish, Ayo Akingbade (with plane-printed motifs), and Palestinian embroidery, curated by Rachel Dedman, who also co-curated the 2024 State of Fashion Biennial in the Netherlands, in which you took part. Your exhibition here includes a direct intervention in the gallery space, part of your long-term project, There's No Place. Can you talk about this collaborative embroidery piece and how it highlights our entanglements in global histories and contemporary political and social realities, too?
In 2019, I went to the border between Thailand and Myanmar in the northern province of Chiangmai. I spent a weekend in storytelling workshops with kids from the Shan ethnic minority group who had been born in this [Koung Jor Shan] refugee camp. We explored their hopes, their dream jobs, and their cultural heritage.
Most of the kids in this refugee camp were stateless. They were born to Burmese parents, but because they were born in Thailand, often in the village or in an orchard where their parents worked, they were not correctly registered. They're not Thai or Burmese, and although the kids can enrol in Thai schools and study as much as they want, the prospects of finding proper jobs are bleak simply because they don't have any legal documents. So often, they fall through the cracks and get exploited. Before that weekend, I didn't realise the extent of the situation of statelessness or protracted refugee situations, where they're stuck in one place and are not trying to move to any other country.
I had this idea to make embroidery patches with the kids to raise awareness in Thailand. Then, I decided I wanted to invite the public to dialogue with the stateless community. In my workshops, the public is invited to embroider on the same pieces touched and stitched by the stainless community. As much as the public may not want to know about these situations, they can’t deny them because they're working on the same fabric that these people have touched.
The stateless Shan community does the colourful parts, while the public is only allowed to use monochrome, black, grey, and white yarns. And that is just to restrict the public, who, daily, have so many, too many, choices to make and to emphasise the fact that there are people just like us with the same dreams, ambitions, and hopes, but their lives are more limited.
Jakkai Siributr: There's no Place is on view at the Whitworth in Manchester until 16 March 2025.
A concurrent solo exhibition of Jakkai Siributr’s work is on view at Flowers Gallery in London until 8 February 2025.
Jakkai, your textile practice has a real duality, bringing together different, often contrasting elements and identities, whether that be Buddhism and materialism in modern-day life or historical traditions and everyday popular culture in Thailand, where you work and live. At the start of the exhibition at the Whitworth, we see Sompong (2023), which draws together antique Burmese Kalang embroidery and machine-mass-produced lace. Next to it, there's Airborne (Klongtoey) (2022), composed of COVID face masks and reconstructed uniforms. Can you talk about the Outworn series and the Phayao-a-Porter project from which they come?
Outworn and Phayao-a-Porter were both products of the pandemic. Many of my planned exhibitions were postponed or cancelled, so to keep my assistants working full-time, I had to find some projects for them. I could shop online and buy all these second-hand garments and clothes. I started designing embroidery patterns on these old, vintage jackets, and when I wore them, people noticed, so I started taking commissions.
During that time, I also reached out to these women in Phayao, who I used to work with when looking for additional seamstresses and dressmakers. Phayao is a remote northern province in Thailand that I was fortunate enough to have visited, and I met these women who were then working for a garment factory. When COVID happened, they all lost their jobs, too, so I was always looking for a way to help them. With this project, I could give them some kind of temporary employment and 30 per cent of the proceeds of each jacket, which goes back to the community in the form of emergency funds, scholarships, or healthcare. It was a limited series because, after the pandemic, everything resumed with my studio production.
Thailand relies mainly on tourism, so when the country closed down during the lockdown, many people from the tourism industry also lost their jobs. Our government, like any other in the world at the time, didn't know what was happening and mismanaged many situations. People weren't getting the financial assistance that they so desperately needed. One of my assistants lived in a community where many people work in the hotel industry, so I wanted to help them in a very small way.
Outworn came from this idea that one way to help them financially was to buy from them their uniforms that became obsolete. I collected uniforms from taxi drivers, hotel, and spa workers, disassembled them, and stitched them into large tapestries. These pieces are embellished with talismanic objects to convey that, after all this time, we seem to forget that many of these people still suffer from the pandemic. They rely on supernatural powers and go to temples for healing, protection, and prosperity because they still cannot rely on their governments.
It also makes me think of the healing potential of embroidery; another artist, Alia Farid, who makes tapestries with Palestinian diasporic communities, speaks of using chain stitching to reinforce communities, often subjugated by political circumstances. I notice how your works also seek to challenge singular media representations. In Changing Room (2017), you explore the binary between Muslims and the Buddhist Thai army on the southern border regions. You are based between Bangkok and Chiangmai. How does this travel, between the capital on the south coast and the mountainous north, and these different cities and contexts, shape your practice?
When I returned to Thailand after university and graduate school [in the United States], my first job was teaching at Thammasat University [in Thailand]. They had just started their textile art program, so I co-founded the Department of Textile and Fashion Design in the Faculty of Fine Arts. Part of the curriculum was that we had to take students on field trips each term to visit remote, weaving villages. It was an introduction back to Thailand because I had been away for almost ten years. I was fifteen when I left, so coming back at 25, I realised there were many things I didn't know. So that was an eye-opening experience for me, too.
We visited the Deep South of Thailand, the three provinces with a border with Malaysia. These trips stopped in the early 2000s because sectarian violence erupted. Here, the majority of the population are ethnic Malay Muslims, but because they live in Thailand, they are a minority in a predominantly Buddhist country.
I didn't return to that area until 2016, on a trip organised by the authorities. When I returned, I talked to many people and saw many things differently from sixteen years before. There were a lot more checkpoints. But even then, I realised these places were not as dangerous as portrayed in the media. When I came back, I wanted the rest of Thailand to know about the situation in the area as well.
Changing Room was a result of that particular trip. It's a work that needs to be activated by the audience. I invite them to try on these military jackets and the Muslim skullcaps (songkoks), which have been embellished with images of violence taken from the internet, to look themselves in the mirror, take a selfie, and post on social media because we're in this selfie-obsessed world. When they look back at the photos, I hope they will start to notice these images on the jackets, ask questions, and want to know more about the situation.
Military jackets and skullcaps have different connotations for different communities. For example, an army jacket means security and safety to a Buddhist, whereas to the Muslim community, it means the total opposite: threat and danger. The same goes for the skull caps traditionally worn by Muslim men, which attract a lot of suspicion from the authorities and mean they often get stopped, searched, and harassed.
This participation also reflects how textiles can often embody lived experience. In other works, you explore double meanings and Thailand's political complexities through your connections between your family and the royal courts of Kings Rama VII (1926-35) and Rama IX (1946-2016). Could you discuss some of those entanglements between these personal and national stories?
The three works from the Matrilineal series (2023) deal with how personal stories intersect with national history. They are a tribute to all the women I grew up with: my mother, my aunt, and my grandmother. Specific incidents in Thai history during that period deeply impacted their lives.
For example, in 1932, when Thailand went from an absolute monarchy to a constitutional monarchy, King Rama VII abdicated and lived in exile in the UK until his death. My grandparents had to accompany the king and were only allowed to bring two of their daughters, so they had to leave the other two behind. My mother, four months old, and my aunt were left behind in Thailand, while the other two sisters moved here [to the UK].
They had not reunited for twelve years, during which many things happened: World War II, King Rama VII's and VIII's deaths. The work speaks to their lives, but most importantly, even though these stories are particular to these women, they also have a universal theme because everybody has their stories to tell. Stories become memories which, like old photographs, will fade away one day, and I often contemplate how we pass on these memories to the next generation. How do we keep retelling these stories?
Thailand is also one of the countries in the Asian region where history is often rewritten or sometimes even erased. And so I think it's important to tell these stories. So Sompong also talks about this particular incident in Thai history that we're not allowed to speak about. One of my mother's great-uncles was a royal page to Rama VIII. When the King was found dead with a bullet hole in his head, he and his two other colleagues became scapegoats and executed. So, after the execution, my great-grandmother brought in his widow and seven daughters to live with us in the compound in Bangkok.
I grew up with these women, whom I refer to as aunties. I saw how they suffered, were ostracised and bullied. Going to school, people would say, your father killed the King, and so on. Sompong is the eldest daughter's name, and she seemed to have great opportunities. She studied abroad and worked at different embassies in Thailand. But I think the stigma that she carried with her in life was just too much, and so she shot herself. So, deep down, these works are about memory, loss, and grief.
The work includes a Burmese embroidery that once belonged to her and was passed on to me by her remaining sisters. I didn't know what to do with it until I worked on this exhibition [in Manchester]. The scene usually depicts princes or kings from the Ramayana tales. I decided to turn this image upside down and cover it with black feathers to represent the black clouds of this tragic incident that still hover over us to this day.
You draw on these entangled histories, not just in the context of Thailand but also in northern England. These themes resound particularly here in Manchester and at the Whitworth, which has held exhibitions of Althea McNish, Ayo Akingbade (with plane-printed motifs), and Palestinian embroidery, curated by Rachel Dedman, who also co-curated the 2024 State of Fashion Biennial in the Netherlands, in which you took part. Your exhibition here includes a direct intervention in the gallery space, part of your long-term project, There's No Place. Can you talk about this collaborative embroidery piece and how it highlights our entanglements in global histories and contemporary political and social realities, too?
In 2019, I went to the border between Thailand and Myanmar in the northern province of Chiangmai. I spent a weekend in storytelling workshops with kids from the Shan ethnic minority group who had been born in this [Koung Jor Shan] refugee camp. We explored their hopes, their dream jobs, and their cultural heritage.
Most of the kids in this refugee camp were stateless. They were born to Burmese parents, but because they were born in Thailand, often in the village or in an orchard where their parents worked, they were not correctly registered. They're not Thai or Burmese, and although the kids can enrol in Thai schools and study as much as they want, the prospects of finding proper jobs are bleak simply because they don't have any legal documents. So often, they fall through the cracks and get exploited. Before that weekend, I didn't realise the extent of the situation of statelessness or protracted refugee situations, where they're stuck in one place and are not trying to move to any other country.
I had this idea to make embroidery patches with the kids to raise awareness in Thailand. Then, I decided I wanted to invite the public to dialogue with the stateless community. In my workshops, the public is invited to embroider on the same pieces touched and stitched by the stainless community. As much as the public may not want to know about these situations, they can’t deny them because they're working on the same fabric that these people have touched.
The stateless Shan community does the colourful parts, while the public is only allowed to use monochrome, black, grey, and white yarns. And that is just to restrict the public, who, daily, have so many, too many, choices to make and to emphasise the fact that there are people just like us with the same dreams, ambitions, and hopes, but their lives are more limited.
Jakkai Siributr: There's no Place is on view at the Whitworth in Manchester until 16 March 2025.
A concurrent solo exhibition of Jakkai Siributr’s work is on view at Flowers Gallery in London until 8 February 2025.
Jakkai, your textile practice has a real duality, bringing together different, often contrasting elements and identities, whether that be Buddhism and materialism in modern-day life or historical traditions and everyday popular culture in Thailand, where you work and live. At the start of the exhibition at the Whitworth, we see Sompong (2023), which draws together antique Burmese Kalang embroidery and machine-mass-produced lace. Next to it, there's Airborne (Klongtoey) (2022), composed of COVID face masks and reconstructed uniforms. Can you talk about the Outworn series and the Phayao-a-Porter project from which they come?
Outworn and Phayao-a-Porter were both products of the pandemic. Many of my planned exhibitions were postponed or cancelled, so to keep my assistants working full-time, I had to find some projects for them. I could shop online and buy all these second-hand garments and clothes. I started designing embroidery patterns on these old, vintage jackets, and when I wore them, people noticed, so I started taking commissions.
During that time, I also reached out to these women in Phayao, who I used to work with when looking for additional seamstresses and dressmakers. Phayao is a remote northern province in Thailand that I was fortunate enough to have visited, and I met these women who were then working for a garment factory. When COVID happened, they all lost their jobs, too, so I was always looking for a way to help them. With this project, I could give them some kind of temporary employment and 30 per cent of the proceeds of each jacket, which goes back to the community in the form of emergency funds, scholarships, or healthcare. It was a limited series because, after the pandemic, everything resumed with my studio production.
Thailand relies mainly on tourism, so when the country closed down during the lockdown, many people from the tourism industry also lost their jobs. Our government, like any other in the world at the time, didn't know what was happening and mismanaged many situations. People weren't getting the financial assistance that they so desperately needed. One of my assistants lived in a community where many people work in the hotel industry, so I wanted to help them in a very small way.
Outworn came from this idea that one way to help them financially was to buy from them their uniforms that became obsolete. I collected uniforms from taxi drivers, hotel, and spa workers, disassembled them, and stitched them into large tapestries. These pieces are embellished with talismanic objects to convey that, after all this time, we seem to forget that many of these people still suffer from the pandemic. They rely on supernatural powers and go to temples for healing, protection, and prosperity because they still cannot rely on their governments.
It also makes me think of the healing potential of embroidery; another artist, Alia Farid, who makes tapestries with Palestinian diasporic communities, speaks of using chain stitching to reinforce communities, often subjugated by political circumstances. I notice how your works also seek to challenge singular media representations. In Changing Room (2017), you explore the binary between Muslims and the Buddhist Thai army on the southern border regions. You are based between Bangkok and Chiangmai. How does this travel, between the capital on the south coast and the mountainous north, and these different cities and contexts, shape your practice?
When I returned to Thailand after university and graduate school [in the United States], my first job was teaching at Thammasat University [in Thailand]. They had just started their textile art program, so I co-founded the Department of Textile and Fashion Design in the Faculty of Fine Arts. Part of the curriculum was that we had to take students on field trips each term to visit remote, weaving villages. It was an introduction back to Thailand because I had been away for almost ten years. I was fifteen when I left, so coming back at 25, I realised there were many things I didn't know. So that was an eye-opening experience for me, too.
We visited the Deep South of Thailand, the three provinces with a border with Malaysia. These trips stopped in the early 2000s because sectarian violence erupted. Here, the majority of the population are ethnic Malay Muslims, but because they live in Thailand, they are a minority in a predominantly Buddhist country.
I didn't return to that area until 2016, on a trip organised by the authorities. When I returned, I talked to many people and saw many things differently from sixteen years before. There were a lot more checkpoints. But even then, I realised these places were not as dangerous as portrayed in the media. When I came back, I wanted the rest of Thailand to know about the situation in the area as well.
Changing Room was a result of that particular trip. It's a work that needs to be activated by the audience. I invite them to try on these military jackets and the Muslim skullcaps (songkoks), which have been embellished with images of violence taken from the internet, to look themselves in the mirror, take a selfie, and post on social media because we're in this selfie-obsessed world. When they look back at the photos, I hope they will start to notice these images on the jackets, ask questions, and want to know more about the situation.
Military jackets and skullcaps have different connotations for different communities. For example, an army jacket means security and safety to a Buddhist, whereas to the Muslim community, it means the total opposite: threat and danger. The same goes for the skull caps traditionally worn by Muslim men, which attract a lot of suspicion from the authorities and mean they often get stopped, searched, and harassed.
This participation also reflects how textiles can often embody lived experience. In other works, you explore double meanings and Thailand's political complexities through your connections between your family and the royal courts of Kings Rama VII (1926-35) and Rama IX (1946-2016). Could you discuss some of those entanglements between these personal and national stories?
The three works from the Matrilineal series (2023) deal with how personal stories intersect with national history. They are a tribute to all the women I grew up with: my mother, my aunt, and my grandmother. Specific incidents in Thai history during that period deeply impacted their lives.
For example, in 1932, when Thailand went from an absolute monarchy to a constitutional monarchy, King Rama VII abdicated and lived in exile in the UK until his death. My grandparents had to accompany the king and were only allowed to bring two of their daughters, so they had to leave the other two behind. My mother, four months old, and my aunt were left behind in Thailand, while the other two sisters moved here [to the UK].
They had not reunited for twelve years, during which many things happened: World War II, King Rama VII's and VIII's deaths. The work speaks to their lives, but most importantly, even though these stories are particular to these women, they also have a universal theme because everybody has their stories to tell. Stories become memories which, like old photographs, will fade away one day, and I often contemplate how we pass on these memories to the next generation. How do we keep retelling these stories?
Thailand is also one of the countries in the Asian region where history is often rewritten or sometimes even erased. And so I think it's important to tell these stories. So Sompong also talks about this particular incident in Thai history that we're not allowed to speak about. One of my mother's great-uncles was a royal page to Rama VIII. When the King was found dead with a bullet hole in his head, he and his two other colleagues became scapegoats and executed. So, after the execution, my great-grandmother brought in his widow and seven daughters to live with us in the compound in Bangkok.
I grew up with these women, whom I refer to as aunties. I saw how they suffered, were ostracised and bullied. Going to school, people would say, your father killed the King, and so on. Sompong is the eldest daughter's name, and she seemed to have great opportunities. She studied abroad and worked at different embassies in Thailand. But I think the stigma that she carried with her in life was just too much, and so she shot herself. So, deep down, these works are about memory, loss, and grief.
The work includes a Burmese embroidery that once belonged to her and was passed on to me by her remaining sisters. I didn't know what to do with it until I worked on this exhibition [in Manchester]. The scene usually depicts princes or kings from the Ramayana tales. I decided to turn this image upside down and cover it with black feathers to represent the black clouds of this tragic incident that still hover over us to this day.
You draw on these entangled histories, not just in the context of Thailand but also in northern England. These themes resound particularly here in Manchester and at the Whitworth, which has held exhibitions of Althea McNish, Ayo Akingbade (with plane-printed motifs), and Palestinian embroidery, curated by Rachel Dedman, who also co-curated the 2024 State of Fashion Biennial in the Netherlands, in which you took part. Your exhibition here includes a direct intervention in the gallery space, part of your long-term project, There's No Place. Can you talk about this collaborative embroidery piece and how it highlights our entanglements in global histories and contemporary political and social realities, too?
In 2019, I went to the border between Thailand and Myanmar in the northern province of Chiangmai. I spent a weekend in storytelling workshops with kids from the Shan ethnic minority group who had been born in this [Koung Jor Shan] refugee camp. We explored their hopes, their dream jobs, and their cultural heritage.
Most of the kids in this refugee camp were stateless. They were born to Burmese parents, but because they were born in Thailand, often in the village or in an orchard where their parents worked, they were not correctly registered. They're not Thai or Burmese, and although the kids can enrol in Thai schools and study as much as they want, the prospects of finding proper jobs are bleak simply because they don't have any legal documents. So often, they fall through the cracks and get exploited. Before that weekend, I didn't realise the extent of the situation of statelessness or protracted refugee situations, where they're stuck in one place and are not trying to move to any other country.
I had this idea to make embroidery patches with the kids to raise awareness in Thailand. Then, I decided I wanted to invite the public to dialogue with the stateless community. In my workshops, the public is invited to embroider on the same pieces touched and stitched by the stainless community. As much as the public may not want to know about these situations, they can’t deny them because they're working on the same fabric that these people have touched.
The stateless Shan community does the colourful parts, while the public is only allowed to use monochrome, black, grey, and white yarns. And that is just to restrict the public, who, daily, have so many, too many, choices to make and to emphasise the fact that there are people just like us with the same dreams, ambitions, and hopes, but their lives are more limited.
Jakkai Siributr: There's no Place is on view at the Whitworth in Manchester until 16 March 2025.
A concurrent solo exhibition of Jakkai Siributr’s work is on view at Flowers Gallery in London until 8 February 2025.
