Jakkai Siributr
There’s no Place
Canal Projects, New York

I first encountered the work of Thai artist Jakkai Siributr in the 2024 Venice Biennale collateral exhibition, “The Spirits of Maritime Crossing,” organized by Apinan Poshyananda at the 17th-century Palazzo Smith Mangilli Valmarana. His installation, There’s no Place (2020– ), featured a cascade of colorful banners hung low across a narrow corridor like curtains, and visitors had to stoop and shimmy their way through. Made in collaboration with communities around the world, the banners are embroidered with children’s drawings. With a painted 18th-century Neoclassical ceiling above, the experience was enchanting.

Knowing that Canal Projects would close with a solo exhibition by Siributr titled “There’s no Place,” I was curious to experience the work in a 19th-century cast-iron building. Canal Street, where SoHo meets Chinatown and Tribeca, is a thoroughfare of Francophone West African vendors peddling counterfeit designer bags and souvenir shops run by Chinese immigrants. Once through the babel of shouts between hawkers and tourists, I found a sanctuary in Siributr’s rainbow-hued textile installations inside the gallery. The multicultural trade in mass-manufactured knockoffs made for an absurd backdrop to the handstitched works that interweave 20th-century Thai history with intimate stories of loss, grief, memory, and the rippling social impact of Covid-19.