<< I have made it a profession to look at the history of others, so it feels rather peculiar to finally be observing my own. I feel nonetheless- or even more so, a stranger to it. Since Grandma’s passing in 2021, I came back to the house on Suan Phlu to find family photos and letters dug up, stacked in plastic bags or shoved into the many haphazard drawers around the house. I find myself fascinated by this time before my time. Having lived most of my life abroad, I’ve always felt estranged from this family history.  Who are these people?  How did they find each other?  How do their stories inform mine? >>* …. 174 / Neung Jed Si - A Short History of Thailand Neung Jed Si is a new research project that uses my family archive to create a mythic origin story for our chosen exile from Thailand. Initially conceived as a video essay, it now extends to an immersive installation and a print publication. Neung Jed Si moves through a meditation on love and how the lover must journey to be reunited with their beloved. Beginning with Pridi Banomyong, my ancestor who was forced into self-exile by a military coup in the 1940s, the narrative expands on our legacy of diaspora and inner alienation from our country of origin. Reflecting this origin-story along personal photographs and letters that surfaced in the process of returning to my Grandma’s house in Thailand, the timeframe of the work ranges from my parents’ long-distance relationship during my father’s studies, to the moment of their decision to remain abroad. Simultaneously, my family traces back to the historical capital of Ayutthaya and services to the king. Conflicted between these two tensions, sedentary and migrant, monarchist and revolutionary, shorelines and bodies of water become recurring motifs that represent this generational discomfort and desire for motion. The installation takes the viewer through a landscape, composed of multimedia projections, image transfers and CNC-routed fragments of landmarks. Central to the space is the CNC sculpture of the facade of the Pomped Fortress in Ayutthaya, from which my ancestors inherited their last name. The facade is a portal around which we perceive other elements of the installation: an animation of boats rocking in my mother’s eyes projected on a translucent glass that I used as a table in my studio in Los Angeles; and, on the opposite wall, a two-channel video of my hand drawing the lines of the Chao Praya river. Further along, a collage of images transferred directly onto the wall shows my father sitting among Greek ruins and references to Aristophanes' myth of the Origin of Love (in Plato’s Symposium). Lastly, a slide projection plays photos of the family archive staged on furniture in my family home in Bangkok. Throughout, the installation carries my narrating voice accompanied by ambient sounds of rivers and a murmuring chorus composed by Louis Fontenot. The narration, presented in the publication as a longer text, weaves stories from my family with my own memories and other mythical references around the concepts of history, love and diaspora. Photos from my family archive, online images and my own footage illustrate the publication. _______________________ *Excerpt from print publication (coinciding with this exhibition): Prima Jalichandra-Sakuntabhai, 174 / Neung Jed Si – A Short History of Thailand (Los Angeles: Reisig and Taylor Contemporary, 2025). __________________________________________________ | Prima Jalichandra-Sakuntabhai (b. Bangkok, Thailand) is a transdisciplinary artist, curator and art worker, currently based in St Paul, Minnesota. They received a Visual Arts Degree from the Ecole des Beaux Arts de Nantes Metropole and a License in Film Studies at the Sorbonne Nouvelle-Paris 3. They hold a BFA from the School of the Arts Institute of Chicago and a MFA from the California College of the Arts, San Francisco. In 2024, their solo exhibition, Pridi in Paris opened at The Fulcrum Press, in Los Angeles. Jalichandra-Sakuntabhai’s work has been widely exhibited in the United States and internationally, in exhibitions at the ONE Archives at USC Libraries and USC Pacific Asia Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Artists’ Television Access, San Francisco, CA; UTS Gallery, Sydney, Australia; esea contemporary, Manchester, UK; CAPC, Museum of Contemporary Art, Bordeaux, France, among others. They participated in the Arizona Biennial 2015 at the Tucson Museum of Art. They held live and online performative lectures at Human Resources, Los Angeles, CA; Marathon Screenings, Los Angeles, CA; Summer University, Performing Arts Forum, Saint Erme-Outre-et-Ramecourt, France; BOOKSHOP LIBRARY, BANGKOK CITY CITY GALLERY, among others. Their curatorial projects involve cross-cultural collaborations between artists working in different parts of the world. For MAHA Pavilion at the Bangkok Biennial 2020, Jalichandra-Sakuntabhai paired artists in the West with performance artists in Bangkok who enacted their score across various sites in the city. Tactics of Erasure and Rewriting Histories, at Craft Contemporary in 2022 and ReflectSpace Gallery in the Glendale Central Library in 2023, features artists with marginalized identities working with erasure methods to counter official narratives of history. The New Commons, for Prospect Art Curatorial Fellowship, is a series of online screenings, virtual live collaborations and discussions around the imaginaries of the homeland as they are shaped by digital communication technologies. Their works have appeared in publications, such as Hyperallergic, Carla, Artillery Magazine and the Performance Art Journal and Thai online media, such as the101.world and [BOOKMARK MAGAZINE], an initiative of BANGKOK CITY CITY GALLERY. They received the SOMA Summer Award to attend the SOMA residency in Mexico City in 2016 and was awarded the California Arts Council 2023 Individual Artist Fellowship. {Biographical information courtesy of the artist.} __________________________________________ [Image: Prima Jalichandra-Sakuntabhai, Mum, Aidos, 2025, still image from animation.{Courtesy of the artist.}]