Queer Silences Art, Sexuality, and Acoustic Neuroma (the Art of Samak Kosem)

In spite of recent advancement in critical thought in such areas as contemporary art, little research on the meanings of silences has been carried out. Silence is understood as an action, not only a state. Reflexive silence has its own logic, rhetoric, and economy. I speak of many silences including radical silence – muteness – and horizons of humanism through a conceptualisation of silence as a series of aberrations and disruptions (acoustic neuroma), not as linear progression of sound and meaning. Of particular relevance are queer silences, that is, radical interruptions of sound and also histories of silencing queer communities. I examine the artwork by the Thai artist and researcher Samak Kosem which was presented at the first biennale of contemporary art in Bangkok in 2018. His art reflects on queer communities in Southern Thailand which is predominantly Muslim. The focus of the discussion is on three elements of Kosem’s project – the method, the exhibition, and the artwork. These three categories correspond to the different meanings of queer silences such as erasure, reflection, and resistance.