For the Bangkok Art Biennale Qayyum creates a site-specific installation using her cockroach motif. Crawling around the Museum Siam’s premises, her distinctive cockroach pattern appears on the building's neoclassical facade as well as on the surrounding garden pathway, informing the history of this landmark site with notions of resilience and resurgence. Responding to BAB curatorial theme of Chaos: Calm, which invites us to reflect on the recent global crisis of the pandemic, unjust wars and the traumatic aftermath of fear, destruction and death, her work functions as a reminder that our survival depends on coming together and on community building. The resulting installation, while conferring to the building a veil of grotesque beauty, serves as a gesture of encouragement and hope by mirroring the efforts of a community to function together for survival and growth through the social and political complexities of our time. In this context her use of the socially rejected household pest, the cockroach, as a landmark motif of her work acquires poignant significance to symbolize endurance, and continuance.

Tazeen Qayyum, Patterns of Resilience, 2022.
Image courtesy of the artist and Bangkok Art Biennale,

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