For the first time since its establishment in 1990, Rangsit University – a high ranked private educational institution in Patum Thani, Bangkok, focused mainly on science, technology, design and management – has organized a festival dedicated to photography: the Rangsit Photo Festival 2013.
The department of photography of the Faculty of Arts and Design has curated eight indoor and outdoor exhibitions set up in many areas of the university’s campus.
The curatorial team, headed by the University’s photogaphy department director Warawan Suwannaphati, has selected Thai artists (but also international photographers) and a wide selection of the photography’s alumni. The final result is not to be considered the classical final course’s exhibition. Certainly this is not properly a photo festival in terms of topics, goals and subjects as well. But Rangsit Photo Festival has been able to shows us a different result: in its first experience, the festival has wisely mixed what education to photography should be: passion, knowledge, curiosity, professionality and fun.
The main starting point of the festival is in one of the best spaces dedicated to art, design and architecture that you can see today in Bangkok – Patana Gallery projected by Studio Make of Im Sarasalin and David Schafer. The amazing green trees rooftop gallery hosts a group show with students, teachers and guest artists some of them former students of Rangsit University. The show collects different kinds of photography: fine art, commercial and documentary.
You can see interesting works as the “Burqa series” by Ampannee Satoh, realized in France after the Government’s Burqa Ban law, and the abstract black and white images by Nitikorn Kraivixien who, maybe not intentionally, are an homage to the rationalistic abstractions of the Italian photographer Luigi Veronesi. It’s an exhibition that bring together several languages of contemporary photography , you could also discover the captivating mistery of hiding and disappearing in the images of Paris-based Thai artist Viriya Chotpanyavisut and, on the opposite side, the crude and pop show off of a fashion shooting backstage directed by Kachain Wonglamthong.
The other exhibitions are dedicated to Landscape, Fashion Photography, Pinhole, Conceptual, Scientific and Portraits. This last series, a long wall just outside of a building site, close to the new modern Faculty of Digital Arts, collected more than thirty big sized black and white portraits of smiling and funny students. There is no specific author, you cannot recognized him or her. the images were photographed by different students. As a street art manifesto, the wall has a message to anonymous viewers but the artists deserve to be seen again, credited and known.
Eliseo Barbàra
mostartists.com
Rangsit Photo Festival
January 14th – February 24th, 2013
Rangsit University
52/347 Muang-Ake, Phaholyothin Road
Muang, Patum Thani
Bangkok
Thailand
