Channels Festival: Kawita Vatanajyankur

Channels Festival is a Naarm/Melbourne based artist-led collective, dedicated to showing emerging trends in contemporary global video art practice. The festival presents a solo commission by Kawita Vatanajyankur.

Kawita Vatanajyankur is a Thai-born artist whose video-based performances explore the ways in which the human body, in particular the female body, is positioned in capitalist frameworks. Her work seeks to reveal the hidden labour/exploitation behind domestic and commercial work by using her own body as an instrument to undertake repetitive tasks, testing her own physical and psychological endurance.

Commissioned by Channels Festival for Blindside, Vatanajyankur’s new body of work explores the rising ethical and sustainability concerns in the fast fashion industry. Her research centres on the exploitation and violence of workers and damaging environmental impacts from the use of genetically modified cotton seeds, chemical dyes and fertilizers used for fast fashion.