“78” is a collaboration with contemporary Thai textile artist, Jakkai Siributr. The installation tells the gruesome story of the notorious Tak Bai Incident, a controversial massacre of 78 southern Thai Muslims by the brutality and negligence of the Thai police in Narathiwat Province in October 2004.
The habitable installation is a 3.5-meter cubed structure made from assembling pre-fabricated steel members from scaffolding. It was designed to be easily shipped from Bangkok to the Art Basel fair in Hong Kong. Inside, 78 bamboo shelves are claustrophobically stacked up, bunk-like along the cube’s interior walls. The artist placed a Kurta -traditional Islamic tunic- which is numbered in Arabic script from 1-78 on each bamboo bunk with the names of each victim stitched in Thai script. The form of 78 is based on Ka’ba, the cuboid structure in Mecca that functions as the destination of the Hajj.
