History Class

In Arter, on the second floor, an outstanding work is exhibited in a relatively larger area that speaks to both local and global concers of history, its consequences and effects. Thai artist Sutee Kunavichhayanont’s “History Class Part 2”, which is adapted from its original outdoor version, creatively reproduces mood of a classroom with twenty three old-fashioned children’s school desks the artist had found in an antique shop are neatly installed in rows. The wooden desktops are carved with barely visible images of contentious events and figures in Thai history that are brought to life when visitors sit down and start rubbing the images with a crayon on paper to reveal them in full.
History Class Part 2 is the adapted version of its original. Sutee installed History Class on the sidewalks of Ratchadamnoern Avenue, not content to adress educated gallery-goers with questions about the manipulation, distortion, rereading, and interpretation of history, the installation purposefully sought a wider public reaction, positioned across from the Democracy Monument where protest, violance, and killings had taken place in both 1973 and 1992.
The history of Thailand since 1973 saw an unstable period of democracy, with military rule being reimposed after bloody coup 1976. The classroom enviroment the artist wants us to feel points out events on 14 October 1973 in Thailand, the student demonstrations demanding a constitution before the massacre.
Despite a decade of educational reform stressing international education and the creation of a “learning society” the “master narrative” of Thai history has created a public mythology of benevolent rulership, but in fact ignores or suppresses the historical evidence of state-spnsored violence against military dictatorship in 1973, 1976 and 1992.Thai schoolchildren learn as Thai history from standardized textbooks and these event are simply not taught to schoolchildren. Sutee use old children’s school desks in his artwork to point