Bhumikorn Kongtaveelert \ Your Good Heart Knows How To Swim (After Ada Limón) III
About the Artwork
Your Good Heart Knows How To Swim (After Ada Limón) III is a two-part installation of a room divider, constructed in response to the dissolved photos of Bhu’s family archives damaged and lost in the 2011 flood in Nakhon Sawan, Thailand. The installation acts as a memory net that captures the joyful moments, a streaming surface of visual and metaphorical light, and a safe space to contemplate how the past continues to enact change in the present. In the practice of archiving his family photographs, Bhu revisits the incomplete image of natural disasters he held onto as a child, seeking an alternative narrative and relationship with water. Reflecting on his childhood and adolescence growing up in Thailand, Bhu’s installation showcases the humanity that can emerge from tragic events. In framing such hardships in this way, Bhu reveals the depth of diasporic intergenerational resilience via remembrance, recollection and recreation of joy.
About Bhumikorn
Bhumikorn Kongtaveelert (he/him) is an interdisciplinary artist and researcher. He creates multichannel immersive environments of moving images based on archives, projected on sculptural screens, often accompanied by oral history interviews. His art practice is an exploration of solidarities through, as Trinh Minh-ha describes, “speaking nearby” interrelated cultures in search of liberation. Via installations, he asks questions too large to contain: How do we recognise the fictitious construct of borders? When might archives be portals to intergenerational resilience and interspecific kinship? What do the practice and bureaucracy of care and belonging look like amidst uncertain climate futures?
Bhumikorn has previously exhibited at Et al., FOG Art+Design Fair, Kearny Street Workshop and Stanford Art Gallery; He was a 2024-25 student artist in residence at Recology San Francisco, 2023 Metaspore Fellow and 2022-2024 fellow at Stanford’s Institute for Diversity in the Arts. He currently studies art practice, computer science and earth systems at Stanford University, and researches the use of AI and data science in improving communities’ access to financing climate resilient infrastructure.