SORAWIT SONGSATAYA

Songsataya was nominated for the 2027 Walters Prize—Aotearoa New Zealand’s most prestigious contemporary art award—for their solo exhibition Fibrous Soul at Govett-Brewster Art Gallery in 2024. In April 2026, Creative New Zealand named Songsataya the recipient of the 2027 Berlin Visual Arts Residency at Künstlerhaus Bethanien.

Early Life and Career

Songsataya moved to Aotearoa New Zealand from Thailand in 2001 as a teenager and is now based in Wellington. They completed a Bachelor of Design at Unitec Institute of Technology (2010) and a Master of Fine Arts at Elam School of Fine Arts, University of Auckland (2013).

Early work, such as Bronies (2016), which was shown at Te Tuhi, Pakuranga, as part of a wider installation, revealed an abiding interest in internet subcultures, queer community formation, and the unexpected routes by which desire circulates online. Taking its title from the online community of adult fans of My Little Pony, the work centred a subculture whose members resist conventional masculinity through their attachment to a girlhood cartoon, allowing Songsataya to explore the fluidity of identity and the power of community in digital spaces.

National recognition followed with Good Kisser (2016)—a pair of 3D-printed, anthropomorphic vases whose puckered lips hover towards one another, one white, one terracotta—which won the National Contemporary Art Award, blind-judged by Misal Adnan Yıldız, then Director of Artspace Aotearoa. The work was praised for connecting the pre-modern form of the vessel, created using contemporary technologies, with the urgency of LGBTQ+ rights in a contemporary art context.

Works and Themes

Songsataya’s work often considers the relationship between human and non-human life, land and place, and life and death, using diverse material textures and sonic experiences. The Interior (2019), a major commission for Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, brought life-size sculptures of extinct and living native birds—made using fibreglass, polyester resin, acrylic lacquer and Oamaru stone, with carving by Brett Tutauanui Keno (Ngāti Ranginui, Ngāi Te Rangi, Ngāi Tahu)—into the gallery’s sculpture court; by bringing extinct and endangered species into an institutional interior, the work disrupted the tendency to relegate the natural world to a distant “outside”.

Ōamaru limestone, formed from the compacted remains of tiny marine organisms, has become a recurring material in Songsataya’s practice. In Amongst the People (2023), held in the collection of Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū, pillar-like forms carved from Ōamaru limestone—referencing the architecture of an ancient Thai temple, a foot basin, and speaker cabinets—house a cast inclusion of beeswax and resin preserving dried plants, seashells, and personal mementos from both Aotearoa and Thailand. The work is the centrepiece of Nirun (2023)—a project whose title is the Thai word for “eternal”—which culminated in an exhibition at Hocken Gallery, University of Otago, Dunedin (18 March–17 June 2023).

Nirun brought together sculpture, film, LED animation, holographic projection, and digital prints. Alongside Amongst the People, the video work Shoulders of Giants interweaves footage of Otago schist and limestone with polarised-light microscopy and symbols of Thai vowels, while Unnamed Islands follows the kōtuku at its West Coast nesting site alongside 3D renderings of foraminifera—organisms that contribute to limestone formation on the sea floor. Both works are accompanied by sonic compositions by Songsataya, including the Thai stringed instrument the khim; across the project, the artist approaches sound, in their own words, as “a language to commune and converse with land,” grounded in the acknowledgement that “beings are interrelated, even the ones we might perceive to be inert or lifeless”.

Moving image has grown increasingly central to their practice. The single-channel video work Unnamed Islands (2023), shown in The Charge That Binds at Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne (2024–25), continues the artist’s interest in the interconnected nature of our living world. The work features footage of the kōtuku (white heron), a bird also found in Thailand, at its only nesting site in Aotearoa on Te Tai Poutini (the West Coast), alongside digitally animated water creatures and 3D renderings of foraminifera shells—tiny organisms that contribute to limestone formation on the sea floor, accompanied by a soundtrack featuring the khim, which references the artist’s place of birth and evokes the drive to return to an imagined home.

More recently, voice has become a primary medium. Residencies at Gasworks, London (2023), and Singapore Art Museum (2024) produced works in which recorded voices of diasporic and trans women communities are threaded into photogrammetrically rendered urban surfaces, making audible what city space renders invisible.

Exhibitions, Commissions and Recognition

Participations in institutional solo and group exhibitions include:

• The Non-Living Agent (2016), Te Tuhi, Pakuranga, Aotearoa New Zealand
• Nature and State (2022), Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, Baden-Baden, Germany
• The Charge That Binds (2024–25), Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne
• Busan Biennale (2024), Busan, South Korea
• Fibrous Soul (2024), Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth, Aotearoa New Zealand
• Singapore Biennale (2025–26), Singapore Art Museum, Singapore

Awards and Residencies

Awards:

• National Contemporary Art Award, for Good Kisser (2016), Waikato Museum Te Whare Taonga o Waikato, Hamilton, Aotearoa New Zealand
• Molly Morpeth Canaday Award, 3D category, for Morning Dew (2020), Whakatāne, Aotearoa New Zealand

The artist has also been awarded numerous residencies including at McCahon House, Titirangi (2018), Gasworks, London (2023), and Singapore Art Museum (2024). In April 2026, Creative New Zealand named Songsataya the recipient of the 2027 Berlin Visual Arts Residency at Künstlerhaus Bethanien.

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Ocula | 2026