Ghost Archives, Thai Contemporary Art

Silenced Heritage, Spectral Aesthetics, and Diasporic Disinheritance

2026–27 Fellowship Project
Käte Hamburger Centre for Advanced Study inherit. heritage in transformation
Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin

Ghost Archives is my research project as a 2026–27 Fellow at the Käte Hamburger Centre for Advanced Study inherit. heritage in transformation at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Situated within inherit’s interdisciplinary investigation of heritage loss and transformation, the project brings together contemporary art, ethnographic and archival research, and community-engaged practice across Thailand and its diaspora.

The project examines ghosts and spirits (ผี / phi) as agents of silenced heritage in contexts shaped by political censure and lèse-majesté. While “hauntology” has gained traction in heritage studies, it often remains a Eurocentric and abstract concept. In Thailand, by contrast, the more-than-human is embedded in everyday life: ghosts and spirits, mediumship (ร่างทรง), and spectral aesthetics can become modes through which suppressed histories are encountered, contested, and reimagined.

Building on prior curatorial research in Bangkok, Ghost Archives combines archival inquiry with community-embedded research among Berlin’s Thai diaspora. Rather than approaching ghosts simply as metaphors for what has been lost, the project understands spectral and more-than-human presences as everyday interlocutors through which relationships between memory, inheritance, political history, and home can be articulated differently.

The research considers how diasporic communities mediate and reinterpret institutional heritage materials through community-led processes, while examining Thai contemporary artistic practice as a mode of disinheritance: a means of refusing official narratives and assembling alternative historical archives. In doing so, it asks how spectral aesthetics and community practice might allow diasporic inheritances to speak differently—and how suppressed pasts might open onto futures not yet scripted.

Moving between aesthetic, ethnographic, social, and political forms, the project is developing toward collaborative artistic and public interventions in Berlin, including engagement with the Thai collections of the Ethnologisches Museum, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin.

Ultimately, Ghost Archives proposes a critical rethinking of heritage: not simply as the preservation of what has been inherited, but as a contested space of loss, haunting, revision, and transformation in which ghosts and spirits can become agents of unfinished worlds.