This lecture is jointly organised with the National Gallery Singapore, and held in conjunction with the Workshop on Dis/assembling Concrete’s Environments.
CHAIRPERSON
Dr Patrick Flores, Chief Curator, National Gallery Singapore
ABSTRACT
In the past fifteen years, concrete and its constituent components—limestone, cement, sand, and aggregate—have become a common medium and subject for Thai contemporary artists. Concrete appears in images of completed, half-built, and ruined infrastructures. It is also displayed on its own, as contextless fragments, replications, and fractures of larger built forms. Sometimes, artists use concrete dust as a means of image-making. During the same period, the country has also experienced profound political and environmental upheaval—floods, coups, protests, air pollution, building booms, earthquakes, and demolitions. What do these developments have to do with each other? Does the emergence of concrete as a material for Thai artists tell us anything about Thai politics? What can Thai politics tell us about the proliferation of artworks cast in concrete? What can both tell us about the fate of this ubiquitous urban material in a time of climate change? In this talk, I explore these questions through a close examination of the work of several artists who use concrete to probe the limits of our precarious present. I suggest that these artists use fragments of the urban environment to say something about the convergence of spatial transformation and political change, on the one hand, and shifting ecological and moral worlds, on the other. By bringing these themes together, I aim to consider both the works themselves and the affective worlds that urban materials educe.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Eli Elinoff is an Associate Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Te Herenga Waka-Victoria University of Wellington. His research focuses on the intersection of political and environmental change in urbanizing Southeast Asia. He is the author of the book Citizen Designs: City-Making and Democracy in Northeastern Thailand (University of Hawaii Press, 2021), the co-editor (with Dr Tyson Vaughan) of Disastrous Times: Beyond Environmental Crisis in Urbanizing Asia (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021), and, most recently (with Dr Kali Rubaii), The Social Properties of Concrete (punctum books, 2025). He has published work in a range of outlets including American Ethnologist, the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Roadsides, Political and Legal Anthropology Review, CITY, and The New Mandala. His ongoing ethnographic project, “A Kingdom in Concrete: Urban Thailand in the Anthropocene”, was awarded a Marsden Fast Start from the Royal Society of New Zealand in 2017.
