Open Studio: Suchart Wannaset

Suchart Wannaset is alumni of the department of Transmedia Art and will work at AIL from 24 Feb till 24 Mar 2025. Suchart opens his temporary studio and shares insights into the work progress.

During his AIL residency, Suchart Wannaset will continue developing his art project Pressure, which sits at the intersection of art and science. Combining kinetic sculptures, video, and sound works, Pressure artistically explores and contributes to the little-known research on the effects of noise on insects – highlighting the harmful effects of noise and light pollution, along with habitat loss caused by suburban expansion in Vienna.

In the video, the artist searches for the pure insect sounds of his childhood, only to find that much has changed. His kinetic sculptures – anthropomorphic insects – add a heavy, imposing presence, symbolizing the exhaustion imposed on these creatures and their environment by human activity. A sound database, compiled during his field recordings, documents the seemingly endless search for undisturbed natural sounds.

Throughout the residency, Wannaset will further refine his large-scale insect sculptures and expand the research on his database of insect sound recordings. Additionally, he will make the database interactive, allowing studio visitors to create soundscapes using their smartphones.

Within his artistic practice Wannaset explores the multi-faceted relationship between culture and nature. The shaping of natural landscapes by humans has far-reaching consequences regarding the relationship to each other as well as changes and preservation. The search for nature and so-called ‘border zones’ is an essential part of Wannaset’s artistic work. His works address social, cultural, queer and ecological phenomena, the concepts of which he implements transmedially with the help of video, sculpture, performance and photography.

Born in Thailand, Suchart Wannaset moved to Vienna at the age of 7. After graduating from ‘die Graphische’ school of media and photography in 2010, he attended a photography masterclass in Paris with Oliviero Toscani in 2011. In 2014 Wannaset decided to apply to the University of Applied Arts in Vienna to study Transmedia Art after being inspired by the work of Professor Brigitte Kowanz, who was the head of the department. He graduated in 2020 with a 57-minute, 3-channel diploma film shot in his birthplace. Suchart Wannaset’s collective works with the Mai Ling collective and individual works have been shown at the Secession Vienna, Brunnenpassage, Tanzquartier Vienna, Parallel, the Austrian Sculpture Park Museum Joanneum, Belveder 21 and Stadtgalerie Salzburg, among others.