Dib Bangkok Brings Alexander Calder’s Art Back Into Motion with ‘Giving Life’
- Manta
- 5 days ago
- 4 min read
Dib Bangkok marks 100 years of Calder’s Circus with more than 160 works exploring movement, transformation and the connections between Thai and international art
Art rarely sits still at Dib Bangkok’s next major exhibition. Opening on 26 September 2026, Giving Life brings together more than 160 works by 33 Thai and international artists, with sculptures that breathe, machines transformed into artworks, interactive installations, moving images and performances all contributing to an exhibition centered on movement, change and what it means to make an artwork feel alive.
Curated by Ariana Chaivaranon, Giving Life is the second major exhibition at Dib following the Bangkok museum’s December 2025 debut. It also arrives at a significant moment in the legacy of American artist Alexander Calder, marking both the centenary of his celebrated Circus and 50 years since his death.
But rather than presenting a conventional Calder retrospective, Dib uses his pioneering experiments with movement as a starting point for a much wider conversation spanning generations, countries and different chapters of Thailand’s own contemporary art history.
A century of making art move
Alexander Calder transformed modern sculpture by introducing movement as an integral part of the artwork. His mobiles could shift with air and gravity, creating compositions that were never entirely static.
Giving Life places two of Calder’s works at the heart of the exhibition, including Untitled from 1963, pictured in the exhibition announcement as a delicate arrangement of suspended black, white and red forms.
Around them, Dib brings together artists who have explored similar questions about movement, animation and transformation through very different materials and periods.
The international lineup includes Izumi Kato, Caitlin Keogh, Cecilia Vicuña, Tuan Andrew Nguyen, Tobias Rehberger, Yukinori Yanagi, Rachel Youn, Paul Chan, Ryan Gander and Kei Imazu. Thai artists include Sutee Kunavichayanont, Vasan Sitthiket, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Surasi Kusolwong and Somboon Hormtientong.
The resulting exhibition moves across sculpture, installation, performance, moving image and archival material rather than following a single medium or generation.
From breathing sculptures to recycled machines
Some of the most intriguing works at Dib will quite literally come to life. Paul Chan’s Breather series uses inflatable and animated forms, while Rachel Youn creates sculptures from recycled machines. Izumi Kato’s unusual freestanding paintings blur distinctions between painting, sculpture and human-like figures, while Caitlin Keogh’s monumental Procession series approaches animation through another visual language.
Tuan Andrew Nguyen brings a more historically charged perspective, using materials from unexploded ordnance to examine conflict and regeneration. Works by Rirkrit Tiravanija, Cecilia Vicuña, Ryan Gander and Kei Imazu further explore participation, interaction and the potential for materials to take on lives beyond their original purposes.
Visitors will not always remain passive observers, either. An interactive breathing white elephant sculpture based on Sutee Kunavichayanont’s Elephant (Breath Donation), created between 1998 and 2001, asks audiences to participate in the act of “giving life” to the work.
Recurring movement performances responding to works by Paul Chan, Cecilia Vicuña and Rachel Youn will extend that idea into live encounters throughout the exhibition. A dedicated screening room and archival presentation add moving images and historical documents to the experience.
Calder’s surprising connection to Bangkok
Giving Life also revisits a lesser-known chapter of Bangkok’s art history. In 1975, during the final months of the Vietnam War, Calder’s Circus was presented at Bangkok’s Bhirasri Institute of Modern Art. It was the first exhibition of Calder’s work in Thailand.
The timing proved particularly interesting. Thai artists were returning home after studying and working overseas, bringing with them new approaches to abstraction, installation and performance. Against wider social and political changes, artists increasingly pushed beyond traditional forms and reconsidered what art could do and whom it could engage.
Dib traces this period through an archive of more than 60 historical materials documenting artistic exchanges and Calder’s influence on experimental practices in Thailand.
Works and archival material connected with artists including Vasan Sitthiket, Surasi Kusolwong, Sutee Kunavichayanont and Somboon Hormtientong explore how sculpture, installation, performance and socially engaged practices developed alongside ideas of “art for life.”
That historical connection gives Calder’s presence in Giving Life particular relevance. His work is not simply being brought to Bangkok because of his importance to Western modernism; the exhibition reconnects him with a moment when his art was already encountering a changing Thai art scene.
Dib enters its next chapter
Giving Life follows Dib Bangkok’s inaugural exhibition, (In)visible Presence, which ran from December 2025 to August 2026 and explored the museum’s origins, its founding collection and the artistic communities connected to its development.
The new exhibition shifts the focus toward vitality and the present while continuing to connect local art histories with broader international conversations.
“Artists are people who bring matter to life,” curator Ariana Chaivaranon says in the exhibition announcement. She describes the works as taking on lives of their own through their ability to “move, react, and transform” in response to physical and historical contexts.
For Dib director Dr. Miwako Tezuka, the exhibition is also part of an unfolding narrative rather than a standalone show. By looking back at the changes taking place in Thai contemporary art during the 1970s while placing them alongside international practices, Dib aims to position local histories within a wider global conversation.
It is an approach that also reflects the ambitions of the relatively new museum itself.
Founded by Purat “Chang” Osathanugrah and built upon the collection of his late father, Petch Osathanugrah, Dib is Thailand’s first major institution dedicated to international contemporary art. Its collection comprises more than 1,000 works by over 200 artists from Thailand and around the world.
Giving Life at Dib Bangkok
Giving Life ชีวิตชีวา runs from 26 September 2026 to 3 May 2027 at Dib Bangkok on Sukhumvit Soi 40 in Phra Khanong, Bangkok.
From 26 September, Dib is open Thursday to Tuesday from 10AM to 7PM and closed on Wednesdays. General admission is THB 700, with a THB 550 rate for Thai residents.
Tickets are THB 250 for students aged 18–22 and THB 150 for students aged 7–17. Advance reservations are available through the museum.
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