Who will guard the guards themselves, 2015

Light box, duratrans and steel frame
Edition of 1 (+ 1 A.P.)
161 x 200 x 9 cm

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Who will guard the guards themselves targets the distance that separates the Paris exhibition from his home in Bangkok as a kind of filter in order to energize space and time which separate reality from its representation. Who will guard the guards themselves is a photograph taken at night by the artist after a military coup on 22 May 2014 and three weeks of army imposed curfew in theThai capital.The image is of a storefront 7-Eleven — an early indicator of global commerce doing business 24/7 — which here has been deserted and, though lit up and nonetheless closed

for business, becomes a symbol of the devastation of daily life brought on by repression.

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When the piece has been shown for the first time as a large light box presented in an empty room in the gallery, the first impression of the work entitled Who will guard the guards themseleves (2015) is from images via a surveillance camera shown on an iPad attached to the wall of the offi- ce at the entrance to the gallery. Here though while it has become banal and domesticated, this mechanism for control also turns out to be ambiguous. The live images in fact are not those of the gallery, but of its 8/10 scale replica that the artist constructed and placed in the very heart of Bangkok nearly exactly a year to the day after the 2014 coup and the imposition of martial law. Positioned in front of the Bangkok Art and Culture Centre on a square that has become a place for protests and rallies, and an area that is also prone to confrontations and arrests, the replica which is sealed from the public offers passersby a glimpse through a glass partition of the light box containing the photograph shown in Paris. While at first inaccessible, this half-real, half- fictional display installed where official institution and public space come together, will subsequent- ly become a mobile exhibition space for university students in Bangkok.

By replicating the exhibition space of a private Parisian gallery in the public arena in Bangkok, and through the use of copying to emphasize the separation between a situation, its interpretation and its transmission, the artist has created a temporary monument which is under surveillance and that explores the capacity of art to play a role in public debate.