Pratchaya is known for his practice of producing critical art by moving things from their original place, physical state, and socio-cultural status. In “This page,” public archives traveled out of the National Gallery as non-art objects and entered a space whose buttressing mechanisms and narratives turn them into “art.” This also applies to the parking curbs, which dominate the all-white exhibition space. The pattern formed by these eight precast concrete parking curbs changes from day to day, for instance, from a network of grids to zigzags. Here, Pratchaya and the exhibition’s curator, Thanavi Chotpradit, challenge viewers to consider what Michael Fried asked in his 1967 essay “Art and Objecthood:” what separates a mere object from a work of art, and under what conditions does one become the other?   

Visitors expecting to see at least one blank page in the archival documents might be let down. Instead, Pratchaya and Thanavi mobilize the sense of intentional blankness metaphorically; what is absent is the readymade narrative that usually dictates how the collection of objects on display should be viewed and understood. The expected explanatory wall text is replaced by a list of objects making up the show, which include, apart from the logbooks and the car stoppers, cardboard storage boxes, 4SEASONS A1000 white paint, and the walls of Building 6 (South Building of the National Gallery of Thailand) and of Bangkok CityCityGallery. The curator does leave some interpretational signposts, including a public lecture, a reading group, and a ring of flash cards for visitors to peruse at the exhibition, with each card bearing a critical term such as “deconstruction” or “readymade” on one side and the definition according to a Tate Modern-produced glossary on the other. This show’s titular blank page will, however, be filled in on the last day of the exhibition with the release of the catalog and curatorial text. 

With “This page,” Pratchaya combines engagement with the archival turn in contemporary art and institutional critique, laying bare the power structures of the art world. The artist’s spatial transposition of the archival material not only gives visibility to the oft-overlooked labor of the museum wardens charged with keeping those records, but also invites a wider critique of the art world’s value system as insufficiently acknowledging those behind the industry’s less glamorous yet necessary operations, including the running of commercial galleries, which visitors see at the start of the exhibition. The deconstructionist approach aligns with the inclusion of varied grid patterns—from the arrangement of the car stoppers to the network of lines on folded paper that visitors can purchase as a souvenir—which embody the boundaries demarcating the interior and exterior of the exhibition space, and by extension what is or isn’t art. These limits are constantly stretched, reorganized and/or dismantled. Interestingly, the 4SEASONS A1000 white paint is used for the walls of both the gallery and of the National Gallery’s Building 6, collapsing the territorial divisions and allowing an expanded field where the logbooks, as with other objects in the art world that are not explicitly artworks, can be reconsidered.