Parallel Worlds
Install view, Channatip Chanvipava: Parallel Worlds at BEK Forum, 2026.
We all come from somewhere.
In the late 20th and early 21st centuries, we used the term “post” to describe a world that felt like an aftermath: postmodern, postcolonial, post-truth. The term points to a break, but only gently, keeping the past as the relational context through which the present is understood. By attaching modernity, colonialism, or truth to a “post” condition, these frameworks are not fully left behind. They remain the primary reference points for our current condition. This deictic language, defining the present by pointing back to what came before, no longer suits our time. We are inhabiting a moment where the structures that once defined the world no longer carry the same authority.
In preparing for this exhibition, I found myself tripping over my own assumptions. I approach the work from the perspective of an American curator at a time when the world order I inherited no longer feels secure. I tell myself that this shift may lead to a better, more equitable, and multipolar world. Still, I catch myself circling around fear, surely emerging from my bias… What does it mean to live in a world where “the West” no longer occupies the position of authority?
There was a time, the “post-era” when power, responsibility, and opposition could be more clearly located. There were leaders and institutions that could be loved, hated, or at least believed in. That clarity has weakened and, for better or worse, what felt immovable now feels open. It is through this tension between inherited power and unstable identity that I approach Parallel Worlds. Across painting, video, and installation, Channatip Chanvipava lays his identity bare with a sincerity that gives the exhibition its force. The work functions like a diary, constructing emotional architectures from fragments of lived experience, but it does not remain private. It becomes an invitation, even a demand, for the viewer to consider how identity is formed within a world no longer organized by a single inherited center.
This question develops out of Chanvipava’s personally located tension between two places and two cultural frameworks: London and Bangkok, East and West. In the “post-era”, this duality operated as a parallel condition, shaping the experience of self across place, memory, and distance. Now memory is tied to place and to the ways it is remembered, reconstructed, and felt over time. People, objects, and spaces return with new emotional weight through distance, migration, and displacement. This gives the exhibition its ground drawn from lived experience, observation, and personal history. These memories are not treated as fixed records, rather they are reconstructed through mental imagery and translated into physical form. The resulting paintings move between abstraction and figuration. The image does not resolve into a single state, it holds multiple conditions at once.
In his practice, painting functions as a process of transformation. Personal experiences, emotions, and fragments of memory are reworked through the act of making. The work is built through intention, recollection, and the attempt to manifest something that cannot be directly retrieved. Earlier works approached this through abstraction, where figures and forms appeared as shifting, energetic fields. Over time, this has moved toward a more figurative language, grounding that sense of energy within the physical presence of the body and its relation to space. This relationship between abstraction and figuration remains central and the figure is never fully stable. It carries traces of movement, of change, of something that continues to shift beneath the surface. The work holds onto that instability rather than seeking to resolve it.
Memory operates across both internal and external systems. It exists as lived experience and as something stored, documented, and revisited through images and recordings. The Memory Box series extends this question through a more intimate scale. These works began as abstract compositions tied to specific emotional states and developed through a shift in process, using materials such as coffee and green tea as initial layers, introducing elements drawn from daily life into the act of painting. The surface remains partially exposed, allowing the structure of the support to remain visible. What is typically expanded across a large canvas is condensed into a limited space, intensifying the relationship between image, material, and memory.
Chanvipava, Infinite Conversations, 2025, oil and green tea on canvas and wood.
In Parallel Worlds, the work moves into video for the first time, using images and recordings accumulated over time to reassemble fragments of lived experience and assign them new meaning. The structure draws on the logic of painting, where duration and repetition create a sense of movement within a fixed frame, but here that movement becomes literal. The work unfolds across two screens, with parallel lines running through the space, echoing recurring motifs from the paintings and suggesting cycles that repeat without fully returning. The projected images appear on suspended primed canvases rather than conventional screens, reinforcing Chanvipava’s interest in the relationship between painting and moving image, while keeping surface central to the experience of the piece.
These concerns also extend into installation, where the viewer, the work, and the architecture occupy the same spatial field. In Slow Dancing, reflection is materialized through a distorted image on the floor that mirrors and displaces the painting itself, allowing the viewer to stand within this reflection and become part of the image without fully recognizing it. Black cables move through this same architectural field, physically connecting separate spaces and echoing the recurring power lines within the paintings themselves. Suspended between image and architecture, these linear structures operate simultaneously as metaphorical infrastructure, drawing, and nervous system, linking image, movement, and memory across the exhibition.
Thus, even as the practice expands into installation and video, it continues to operate through the logic of painting, through attention to surface, duration, and the slow construction of an image that resists final resolution. Seen this way, Parallel Worlds is not an exhibition about the aftermath of an old order, but about the formation of identity when inherited structures no longer explain where we are. Channatip Chanvipava’s work does not resist this condition, it works through it, allowing identity to emerge across places, relationships, and time. The image oscillates in motion, refusing to resolve into a single state, while the past becomes more than an archive, opening onto new forms, identities, and futures. Instability begins to take on a different meaning, marking the absence of a fixed hierarchy and allowing for a different kind of formation.
Install view, Chanvipava, Parallel Worlds, two-channel video installation, 2026.
Curatorial essay for Channatip Chanvipava: Parallel Worlds at BEK Forum Vienna, 29 May – 25 July 2026.
The essay is included in the exhibition’s online archive by Open Forum.
