Exhibitions

Kawita has achieved significant recognition since graduating from RMIT University in 2011. In 2015 she was a Finalist in the Jaguar Asia Pacific Tech Art Prize and curated into the prestigious Thailand Eye exhibition at Saatchi Gallery, London. In 2017, her work was curated into ‘Islands in the Stream’ exhibition in Venice, Italy, alongside the 57th Venice Biennale.In 2018, She showed her works as part of the Bangkok Art Biennale.  In 2019, she held her largest museum show at Albright Knox Art Gallery in New York.

Museum Collections

Her work is held at the National Collection of Thailand and in Museum collections, including Singapore Art Museum, Dunedin Public Art Gallery (Dunedin Art Museum), Mariam Contemporary Art Museum, and university collections and private collections in Australia, New Zealand, Asia, Europe, and America.

The latest project – it’s called fieldwork

It is about the agriculture behind mass production, and it focuses on the expectation towards both natural resources and human resources behind industrialized agriculture. Kawita went to countries like India, speak to the cotton farmers about the issue with the current mass production and how it has affected that way.

I grew up in a law and justice family, where everyone in my family was either lawyers or judges or attorneys. Every night, in the past, we would have dinner together where my, when I was, you know, when I was young, my grandpa was still, was still around. My great-grandfather was the president of the Supreme court. We talked about cases and how the law has developed.

I think the words represent the evolution of the advertisement on billboards, magazines or online social media. The products, for example, you see like the packaging of the food of products, you see as a beautiful graphic design packaging. For instance, like with the fishing, you can get like the smiling fish, for example? I think it’s an illusion of what society makes people believe that everything looks beautiful without any problems from the outside so that they would ignore and forget what’s behind the scenes. I think that my work is candy-coated. So it’s like you see this work, which is like a vibrant candy colour from the outside, but when you go and look at the meaning behind the work, it’s pretty violent. It’s what’s behind the scenes, and it’s what people are being treated.

I think during the performance, I lose myself to a point where I don’t feel like a human being. At first, because then you’re transferring your human body into a tool, object, or machine working repetitively. For example, knit as a one-hour performance. But I think during the performance is about transforming yourself into a non-feeling object or machine. And doing the performance part is where I feel I lose my sense of being, sense of a self.

We tend to ignore the people behind the industrialized doors, the factory windows behind the walls, who are working repetitively to make money for the system to work. What happens if the education system is still the same, teaching people to be either tools or machines doing the same thing, but then the technology has grown. What’s a way to replace human jobs without education that treats people to be diverse, out of the box. Then these human beings would not have any jobs. And that would be problematic too, within the future. Either way, both now and the future with the current mindset of the economy is not very sustainable.

This project is about labour exploitation within the fast fashion industry. Especially in Southeast Asia, where the work of women garment workers was being treated unfairly and sometimes with violence. With unfair payment within the garment factories, especially in Bangladesh, Cambodia, and Mangalore, I researched these three countries.