Pratchaya Phinthong

Pratchaya Phinthong creates situations as an invitation made to the visitor to share an experience with him. His projects (without any specific or pred-defined forms) suggest a crack in which the spectators are invited to fill the gaps. He builds a set, a fiction, or a process where he can test our perceptions. He proposes to his audience a story with multiple paths. A trip down memory lane combined with subjective perceptions. His projects are often constructed in a dialogue between the artist and the others, making the artist’s movement glide towards the social field.
Beyond any artistical or formal experience, the artist is looking to find his place and his identity playing on the economic representations and cultural existences.The ‘gallery’ space becomes a free area.
There fore, Pratchaya Phinthong works in a dynamic area in between different realitie sunderlining the space and distance that separates them: two geographical points, two societies, two economic systems.
Traveling is also a key element of his work. The experience of displacement was the focal point of the exhibition “if I dig a very deep hole” that took place in gb agency in 2007. A mental and physical displacement all at once. Sort of a self-portrait of the artist in Paris, “if I dig a very big hole…” portrayed two moons on a negative. The artist found where the extreme geographically opposite place would be to Paris if we could draw a straight line through the globe.
He then went to photograph the full moon on the Chatham islands (New Zealand) before coming to Paris to photograph the same full moon. The same motive, the same thing, two places diametrically opposite from one another, two individual experiences, two different moments are reunited in this work. The clear resolution of this long trip appeared hollow, as a kind of negative or print, almost unperceivable.