Wantanee Siripattananuntakul is a Thai artist based in Bangkok. Working across moving image, installation, sound, sculpture, and archival materials, she examines how systems of value, ownership, classification, and political power enter intimate life. Her long relationship with Beuys, an African grey parrot, and her experiences of family loss have deepened her inquiry into the limits of human knowledge and the possibility of attending to other lives, materials, and forces.

She received a B.F.A. in Sculpture from Silpakorn University and completed her studies as a Meisterschülerin at the University of the Arts Bremen. Selected presentations include the Thai Pavilion at the 53rd Venice Biennale in 2009, Bangkok Art Biennale in 2022, Thailand Biennale, Chiang Rai in 2023, and a solo presentation at Frieze London in 2023. She is a 2026 Visual Arts Fellow of the Civitella Ranieri Foundation. Recent residencies include Art Explora x Cité internationale des arts in Paris and Cemeti x SAM Fund for Arts and Ecology in Yogyakarta.

Can you tell us about your background and how you started your artistic journey?

I studied sculpture at Silpakorn University in Bangkok and later Media Art at the University of the Arts Bremen in Germany. In each case, I chose the field because I did not like what I had seen of it at the time. That resistance made me curious. I wanted to understand whether it came from the medium itself or from the limited ways it had been presented to me. By studying it closely, I hoped to find another way of understanding and working with it.

This became an important part of how I approached art: moving towards what I did not understand instead of remaining with what was already comfortable. My movement from sculpture into video, sound, and installation was therefore not simply a progression from one medium to another. Each medium tested the limits of how I had learned to see.

Even so, art still existed within a safe zone for me. The decisive shift began after my father died in 2009. I spent the next few years feeling unmoored and questioning almost everything, including what life is and what it means to continue as an artist.

This change first became visible in my 2012 solo exhibition, (Dis)continuity. Until then, much of my work had criticised the art world while still remaining within it. In (Dis)continuity, I presented the actual costs and debt involved in producing the exhibition. For the first time, I began to question my own future as an artist through the economic conditions that made artistic production possible. The exhibition made these conditions visible, but the more fundamental questions that had emerged after my father’s death remained unresolved. The media I used did not change all at once, but my reason for making art did.

What are the main themes or concepts you explore in your work?

A central question in my work is how humans create systems to explain, organise, and assign value to lives, objects, histories, and places. In works dealing with taxation, property, bureaucracy, and political history, I examine how these systems enter private life. They shape what can be owned, recognised, recorded, remembered, or erased.

My life with Beuys opened another side of this question. Our relationship is inseparable from care, but it is also framed by ownership, species classification, and official documentation. These frameworks can identify and regulate her, but they cannot tell me how she experiences the world. Living with her has made me question the authority involved in interpreting another life.

Recent works involving gravity, material forces, and ground approach this question through control. I can initiate an event and establish its conditions, but I cannot fully determine what follows. These areas of my practice remain distinct, but each examines the point at which human systems of knowledge, value, or control can no longer fully contain what they are trying to organise.

Who or what are your biggest influences, both artistically and personally?

I find it difficult to separate artistic influences from personal ones. The deepest influences on my life and work have come from my father, my mother, and Beuys. Their influence does not come through a particular style or method. Each has changed the position from which I approach art.

My father’s death in 2009 was the first major rupture in my life and practice. It made questions of value, instability, and what it means to continue impossible to keep at a distance.

In 2013, while visiting a zoo, I heard a parrot calling out and greeting visitors in several languages. For a moment, something inside me seemed to wake up. I can only describe it as a magical moment. After about a month of researching parrots, I decided to live with Beuys.

She came into my life while I was still feeling unmoored. She became, and remains, an important source of emotional support and a spiritual guide. By spiritual guide, I do not mean that she gives me answers. Her presence redirects my attention and changes how I look at the world. Since 2013, my life and work with her have repeatedly shown me where human language and thought reach their limits.

When my mother died in 2023, the experience of losing her converged with questions that had been developing through my life and work with Beuys. The work that followed began with her embroideries, walking stick, and other objects she had left behind. Yet as it developed, I realised that returning to memory and to the traces held in these objects could not take me far enough into the questions her death had opened. Her death made the limits I had already encountered through Beuys more urgent.

I know that I cannot simply step outside a human position, but these experiences have made it necessary for me to search for ways of working that do not treat it as the central measure of the world.

Can you describe a recent project or artwork that you are particularly proud of?

I find it difficult to single out one project, because each work emerges from a different moment and set of conditions. Rather than choosing one that I value above the others, I would like to speak about Remnants of Fading Shadows, my solo exhibition at The Art Centre, Silpakorn University, Bangkok, in 2025. It brought together works and materials developed and accumulated over twelve years and allowed me to see that period of my practice in one place.

Across its spaces, the exhibition moved between political and imperial histories, family loss, personal and institutional archives, and my life with Beuys since 2013.

One of the new works was Making Shadows Speak. Images from Paris and Bangkok bring museums, monuments, animal remains, and imperial symbols into a nonlinear structure. The work examines how power persists through images, objects, and the ways history is displayed. The film concludes with a parrot perched on the head of a sculpture of Napoleon, bringing a living presence into relation with a monument of imperial power.

Other parts of the exhibition included my mother’s embroideries and walking stick, works connected to my father, and an archive of my life with Beuys. The archive contained food packages, veterinary records, receipts, official documents, harnesses, and moulted feathers. These materials came from ordinary routines of care, while also revealing systems of ownership, classification, and value.

What mattered to me was that works from different periods could remain distinct while being understood in relation to one another. Seeing them together made visible both recurring concerns and shifts in how I had approached them during that period. The exhibition gave me a clearer understanding of what had accumulated, including the questions that remained unresolved.

What challenges have you faced as an artist, and how have you overcome them?

One recurring challenge is how to keep my existing knowledge and intentions from determining in advance what a work can become, while recognising that artistic methods are still shaped by human perception and language.

Bodies of Force was one attempt to approach this challenge through movement. It is a video installation presented across three channels. At each of three sites, my deliberate action within the recorded event was limited to releasing a coin. From that point onward, gravity, wind, friction, terrain, and the surface of each site shaped its path. Each channel records a movement that I neither directed, corrected, nor repeated.

This changed my role within the process. Rather than directing the event, I attended to a movement produced through the relation between the coin and the conditions of each site. My decisions concerned how the event was recorded and presented rather than how the movement unfolded.

I do not think this challenge can be resolved through a single method. In some works, I reduce my intervention once the initial conditions are established. In others, an encounter changes the question, method, or point of departure before the work takes form. What connects these approaches is an effort to allow what I encounter to alter the work, while remaining responsible for how I attend to and present it.

What do you hope people take away from your art when they experience it?

I do not want viewers to leave with a single message or to agree with a conclusion I have already made. I hope the work unsettles what seems familiar or already understood and creates some uncertainty about the position from which they see the world.

This intention runs across my practice, whether a work begins with a political or economic structure, a personal experience, another species, or a material force. The subjects and methods change, but I keep asking how a particular system or way of thinking determines what can be seen, valued, or understood, and what remains outside it.

I hope viewers become aware not only of what they are looking at, but also of the assumptions that shape their view. If a familiar explanation begins to feel incomplete and attention shifts towards what that explanation could not contain, then the work has done what I hope it can do.

Text and photo courtesy of Wantanee Siripattananuntakul

Website: https://wantaneesiri.com
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