Avant-Garde Now: Performing for the Camera at M+

"In a similar vein, Thai performance artist Kawita Vatanajyankur embarked on research trips to visit factories and farms of Southeast Asia where women comprise a majority of the workforce. In her works, she uses her own body often as a tool or a machine, as in her “Performing Textiles” projects such as the video-performance Shuttle (2018) where she dives through the threads and slips of a textile as if she were a part of the loom. She also screened footage of Domesticated (2020), a performance at the Museum of Contemporary Art Bangkok in 2020, where she kept her body rigidly straight as figures in white janitor suits treated her body and her long hair like a mop to clean the floors. In a new work for M+, Voting Theatre II (2024), developed in collaboration with AI specialist and MIT researcher Pat Pataranutaporn, she asked the audience to respond to two AI versions of herself posing existential questions about the relationship between humans and nonhuman consciousness."