Kite participates in Thailand Biennale

Kite (Oglála Lakȟóta) debuts two new commissions by Thailand’s Office of Contemporary Art and Culture (OCAC) for Eternal [Kalpa], the fourth edition of its roving Thailand Biennale on the nation’s southernmost island of Phuket.

Kite is one of 60 artists from Asia and beyond whose practice and exhibited works hold dynamic conversation with the Biennale’s title and theme Eternal [Kalpa], which speaks to a Hindu-Buddhist conception of time as the lifetime of the universe. The curators write, “Eternal [Kalpa] is a prompt to take cues from the natural world and dwell in a more mindful, accommodating time. Diverse tempos are introduced by streams of artistic research and dialogue across many fields: architecture, music, visual art, theater, performance, design, film, literature, and the sciences. A more embracing politics—sensate, polyrhythmic—demands new modes of listening, feeling, and tasting. What could such a multisensory re-education teach us about our interdependence? What intangible resources, what customary and embodied knowledge, can be passed on to the next generations?”

Kite’s large-scale floor installation Awáŋmayaŋke (It protects me) (2025) doubles as a sonic score. Lakȟóta philosophy draws a clear connection between the body and knowledge-making (artmaking), and insists the reality of location be enfolded, thus the stones have been borrowed from around Phuket island. Its mandala-like symmetries enact kapémni, the Lakȟóta knowledge of Earth-Sky mirroring. At the center of the dream, a star-shaped cloud formed by inverted mountains symbolizes entrapment. Lightning, or transformation, emanates from the mountains’ shadowed knowledge that remains outside of knowability. Stars emerge to share knowledge, followed by large stars of combined feathers, or gifts of honour and reciprocity. What lies beyond the stars, Kite says, “is beyond meaning altogether.” 

With the second commissioned work, Mázatke (Heavy Metal) (2025), Kite invites viewers to notice their collaborations with nonhuman beings: how the kinship offered by stones can extend to the minerals and metals within them, increasingly extracted to serve human desires. She asks, “What nonhuman beings are we listening to? From what ancestries?” Mázatke (Heavy Metal), a humanmade conglomerate, considers the heaviness of objects—especially the historical connections and contingencies required to bring an artwork into being. Combining crystals, stones, glass, metal beads, and lustre dust, the meteor-like sculpture rests atop a mirrored pedestal, reflecting itself as it refracts light. 

Awáŋmayaŋke (It protects me) and Mázatke (Heavy Metal) can be viewed at Phunpol Building on ground and mezzanine levels during open hours of the biennale from November 29, 2025–April 30, 2026. View the online guidebook on pages 93-95 and 101-104.

Eternal [Kalpa] is conceived and realized by Artistic Directors Arin Rungjang and David Teh and Curators Hera Chan and Marisa Phandharakrajadej, with Advisors Erin Robideaux Gleeson, Sachiko Namba, and Vidya Shivadas.