PRACTICE RESPOND SUPPORT
PRACTICE RESPOND SUPPORT
A series of conversations with our creative community
What does it mean to build and activate a ‘practice’ in the arts - as artists, curators and supporters?
Why is it critical to understand that to effectively ‘practice’, we must understand it as a mode of doing, as a commitment that is repetitive, cumulative, embodied and embedded?
Why is it important to understand how our creative motivations and methods are situated and responsive to community, and that often such desire is produced by such community?
How is such responsive practice supported, and by what kinds of people, place and materiality?
Why is it important to consider the experiences of our audiences within such ‘practice’?
Beginning March, 2026, this program seeks to engage such questions with our art community in Thailand. Delivered in variable formats - as moderated conversations, reading groups, workshops, traveling field-work, writing grants, visual displays and more - deCentral presents such discussions at various locations in Bangkok and Chiang Mai, with gratitude to particular local creative communities who agree to co-host.
‘Practice Respond Support’ invites local and foreign artists, curators, writers, collectors, galleries, teachers and students (and more) to share their experiences and projects in critical curated conversations concerning the shape of our art ecology in Thailand today, seeking to better understand its current dilemmas and what it dreams for its future.
deCentral looks forward to learning with our community, towards being better equipped to initiate, produce, deliver, learn and benefit from our variable commitments to art and its transdisciplinary relevance in society today.
*Confirmed details of this program’s hosts and participants will be updated in due course, please check our social media channels for further announcements!
This program is divided into three sections.
An Open Call
Details on how to apply coming soon
deCentral offers 6 emerging writers living in Thailand the chance to travel across the country, researching specific artistic communities. Eligible applicants (regardless of age or nationality) must be currently living in Thailand.
Each grant aims to raise invested awareness of artistic communities across Thailand, whilst encouraging new voices in art writing, towards fostering deeper reflection of this country’s diverse artistic scene.
deCentral seeks proposals for travel and research, towards one piece of writing that critically engages the art ecology beyond Bangkok, discussing exhibitions, art events, artists or collectives.
Selected essays will be published in partnership with Art & Market and 101 World, in English and Thai respectively.
Beginning 25 April 2026
Beginning 25 April, this series of conversations explores what it means to ‘practice’ in the arts - as artists, curators and supporters - giving insight to the context of Thailand and beyond.
At deCentral, we consider practice as an ongoing process rather than a singular act, shaped through duration, repetition, embodied knowledge and situated relationships. These conversations seek to challenge and provoke our assumptions of scale and speed in productivity, questioning the role of spectacle, towards a deeper understanding of what it means to ‘professionalize’ and give competency to our artistic landscapes. Contemporary culture today fetishises the new, promoting ‘once in a lifetime experiences’ with popular statistics to entice audience consumption. In this program, we will think about what it means to value artistic practices that are slow in generation, repetitive in occurrence, and often realized with people and places that are not visible in our market oriented art worlds. In ‘Practicing Practice(s), we ask how art can comprise a practice, of why such time and labor should be a site where new temporalities, politics and affinities emerge.
Practicing Practice(s) is conceived and led by Ariane Sutthavong, with contributions by Zoe Butt
An Open Call
Details on how to apply coming soon
‘Monsoon School’ is an experimental program of informal workshops, field trips, residencies, and open studios, taking place during the monsoon months (August - November, 2026) in Chiang Mai and Chiang Rai, Northern Thailand.
Such areas/regions are shaped by mountainous terrains, river systems, forests, and agricultural landscapes that are deeply structured by rain cycles which organize time, labor, mobility, rest, and everyday life. However, such monsoonal damage has recently intensified as a consequence of climate instability, forest loss, monoculture agriculture, hydropower development, tourism-driven urbanization, and recurring seasonal haze. Monsoon School approaches such conditions not merely as a climatic phenomenon, but as a lived framework for understanding how ecology, history, and social relations intersect.
Via Open Call - to be announced in June - diverse creative participants from across Southeast Asia (artists, curators, moving image and theatre makers, architects, community organizers and more) will be selected for having critically engaged their practices as spatial in method, realized with particular community that ponders a shared set of questions. Facilitated by acclaimed invited practitioners whose practices have consistently developed field-informed methodologies across transnational Southeast Asia, ‘Monsoon School’ asks how the context of a site can reveal a particular method of address. Emphasizing artistic practice that is situated in knowledge, requiring sustained presence and negotiation, Monsoon School aims to reveal ways of working that are responsive and accountable to the contexts in which they unfold.
Monsoon School is conceived and led by Van Do.
Stay tuned for more details in the coming months!