New York
Jakkai Siributr’s “There’s no Place” (on view through May 23, 2026) greets viewers with an intense field of color and pattern. Tapestry-like forms and textile panels stitched with simple, almost childlike drawings hang at varying heights across the space. The intricate detailing invites us to wander closer, step inside, and discover the stories that begin to unfold. Each work is created from multiple fragments that come together to form a reconstructed object carrying layered histories. In this way, Siributr, whose practice draws on private as well as collective experience, performs an analogy of mending by joining separate cast-offs into a new continuity that allows each piece to retain and reactivate its individual material memory.
While the show includes selections from several bodies of work—including Airborne (Klongtoey) (2022), created with uniforms collected from workers in Thailand’s tourism and service industries during the pandemic, and Matrilineal (2023), a deeply personal project made in response to the death of Siributr’s mother—it centers on There’s no Place (2019–ongoing). This continually growing work stems from a collaborative embroidery project begun in the Koung Jor Shan Refugee Camp on the Thailand-Myanmar border, where Siributr invites young, stateless participants to stitch their stories in a series of workshops. Their fabric canvases come from discards, mirroring lives similarly pushed to the margins, where personal narratives are often shaped through collective tragedy. Using this shared surface, participants transform reconstructed material into a site where new identities and futures can be collectively articulated, giving form to imaginative freedom within conditions of restriction.
The distinctive schematic stitching uses basic geometric shapes and simple lines to construct bodies, animals, and everyday scenes. Many of the figures appear to be smiling, reinforcing the images’ sense of fond memories—moments such as sitting at the kitchen table, being outside in nature, or playing music. A ballerina may represent a dream that feels out of reach, while other scenes might recall or imagine simple pleasures that feel distant from present conditions. Far removed from the familiarity and routines of home, the participants’ acts of repair become expressions of memory and aspiration. These everyday gestures express personal codes of persistence and survival, preserving an imagined reality through which hope is maintained. In this way, Siributr’s practice presents mending as both a technical procedure and a creative gesture, confronting material fragility while foregrounding the social relations embedded in acts of repair.
Because There’s no Place is ongoing, Siributr’s practice presents a repository of lived experience. As long as the stitching continues, repair is not a completed act but a constantly evolving process. This implies that the social fractures to which the work responds—violence, forced migration, inequality—remain structurally unresolved. Siributr’s practice thus frames mending as a material action as well as a collective social imperative, reinscribing the necessity of shared resistance. The project speaks eloquently and beautifully to our collective capacity to mend fragile spaces of vulnerability, with mending becoming a way to imagine how broken social relations might be stitched back together through continual, shared actions.
