Vernacular Objects: Yaowarat Through the Eyes of a CuratorThis Exhibition Transforms Everyday Objects into a City Dialect
Bangkok Kunsthalle, a contemporary art space in the heart of Yaowarat, presents "Vernacular Objects," an exhibition curated by Mark Chearavanont that invites visitors to see the district through the quiet poetry of its everyday materials. The exhibition showcases a collection of readymades gathered from the surrounding neighbourhood - objects originally created as improvised parking space holders. Born out of pure necessity, these constructions shift inside the Bangkok Kunsthalle from functional street markers into aesthetic artefacts and informal anthropological documents, revealing a vernacular unique to Yaowarat.
In this project the curator assembles objects shaped by the neighbourhood's ingenuity - flattened tires tied with plastic string from a motorcycle repair shop on Santhipap Road, rounded acrylic sheets echoing the sign-making workshops near the July 22nd Roundabout, and humble domestic fragments reconfigured into makeshift still lifes. In their original contexts, these objects quietly organise space and support the rhythms of daily life. Within the gallery, however, they invite new ways of reading the city, tracing stories of use, resourcefulness, and the shared creativity that emerges from ordinary hands.
"To me, these objects represent a dialect," Mark notes. "Each material forms a 'word,' and each method of construction becomes a kind of 'grammar.' The resulting forms are like fragmented 'phrases.' When brought together through the perspective of a curator with an artist's instinct, these utterances begin to form coherent 'sentences' and 'paragraphs.' A codified language emerges - a vernacular of Yaowarat. It manifests not as rigid prose, but as loose poetic expressions, like physical haikus."
Rather than glorifying their humble origins, "Vernacular Objects" invites visitors to pause and look again - to recognise how a neighbourhood expresses itself not only through architecture or heritage, but through the small, improvised structures shaped by necessity and care. Together, these gestures form a gentle visual grammar, a local dialect written in material, form, and the everyday choreography of Yaowarat life.
The exhibition runs from 29 November 2025 to 15 March 2026, open every Saturday and Sunday from 2 PM to 8 PM at Bangkok Kunsthalle.
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