Common, commune, collective, community, care, cultural policy, cultural workers, and creative labour. These terms, all beginning with “c” in English, started floating around in the Thai creative industries during the two adjunct historical phenomena: the COVID-19 pandemic and the youth-led uprising in the 2020s. They consolidate political and economic frustrations during and after the country’s healthcare crisis. This presentation investigates the growing interest in the creative labour movement in Thailand, how it addresses precarity in the cultural sector, and the awareness of solidarity and collectivism against the confines of the state and the interests of capitalism. It focuses on two initiatives, namely, Inappropriate Book Club (iBC) and Creative Workers Union Thailand (CUT), as alternative models of activism against precarity.

Thanavi Chotpradit is a lecturer of history of modern and contemporary art in Thailand at the Department of Art History, Faculty of Archaeology, Silpakorn University, Bangkok. She is an independent curator, a member of the editorial collective of a peer-review journal Southeast of Now: Directions in Contemporary and Modern Art in Asia and a co-founder of “readtherunes”, a Bangkok-based publisher. She participated in a cross-regional research program, “Ambitious Alignments: New Histories of Southeast Asian Art,” developed by the Power Institute Foundation for Art and Visual Culture, University of Sydney, Australia, and funded by the Getty Foundation’s Connecting Art Histories initiative (2015-2016). Her research on the photographs of the 6th October Massacre (1976) is funded by the National Research Council of Thailand (2019-2022). She is a co-curator of Phantasmapolis: 2021 Asian Art Biennial at National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts. Her latest article “Shattering Glass Ceiling: Art and Activism in Thailand since 2020” is published in The Routledge Companion to Art and Activism in the Twenty-First Century, (Routledge, New York and London, 2023). Her areas of interest include modern and Thai contemporary art in relation to memory studies, war commemoration, Thai politics and archival practices.

Co-presented by the Power Institute and VisAsia at the Art Gallery of NSW.