Sala: In Nobody's Service

The artistic and scholarly research projects presented in this exhibition (initially at Galerie Wedding Berlin in 2024 and publication by Bom Dia Books 2025) depart from the extremely violent cliché images that are being projected especially on Thai and Filipina women and queer people who live in Europe. The continuation and reproduction of these racist images triggered us, the collective un.thai.tled, to dig deeper into such histories and social realities. This project continues our trajectory from previous engagements with the Thai community at Preußenpark (“Thai Park”) Berlin (exhibition “Beyond the kitchen” at Villa Oppenheim district museum Berlin and “There is no Thai Park” at SAC Bangkok 2021). It brings our Thai collective together with Filipino diasporic artists, and - in doing so - opens up the conversation about sex work/prostitution, care labor, gender, and migration between three countries. Here we take the chance to reclaim our right to heal and to liberate ourselves temporarily.

Installation works of Sarnt Utamachote & Wisanu Phu-artdun & Manika Tejapaibul weaves interviews recorded in Isaan of women who have residence in the West, with mirror plates made to refl ect on audiences’ relationship to the subject. Bussaraporn Thongchai’s collage and Krisanta Caguioa-Mönnich’s portrait series show the bureaucratic and traumatizing diffi culties of migration, as they narrate the stories of clients at Ban Ying - Berlin’s oldest shelter house and consultant center for traffi cked women (founded in 1989 to support Thai and Filipina sex workers there). Sisu Satrawaha’s installation looks at the “behind” of kitchen: lives of these women who try to make papaya salad (Somtam) in Berlin, Rosalia Namsai Enghuan’s video, and Raksa Seelapan’s photograph series looks at the “behind” of a Thai massage industry complex, related to orientalism of knowledge production, and Raksa’s bodywork at massage salon in Hamburg. Sketches of Natthapong Samakkaew which depicts Thai sex workers and brothels in Frankfurt’s red-light brothel, similar to Oat Montien’s oil painting of an immigrant male dancer in Bangkok’s Patpong, and Manita Kaewsomnuk’s acrylic paintings of the women, developed with Issarachon Foundation, all seeing them as subjects of their lives. Universe Baldoza’s video installation then brings us back to the root of all these interracial relations: a specific bodypart, which we forgot to talk about. Jasmin Werner’s poster installation questions ideas of autonomy, desire, colonial language, and the politics of representation based on a sex education poster she found.
*The phrase ที่นี่ไม่เปิดให้บริการ is a language play, it means either ‘this place is not open for service,’ or literally, ‘for nobody’s service.’