The director of the city’s largest downtown gallery and cultural center today announced that he has been fired after refusing to resign.
Pawit Mahasarinand, director of the Bangkok Art and Culture Centre, said in a Tuesday statement that he believed he was fired last month for speaking out against the city’s defunding of the center, over a year after a failed bid to gut the facility and turn it into a “coworking space.”
Pawit, a former university arts professor, said he was told the board “was not satisfied with me expressing my opinion on City Hall supporting more funding to the public and media. Also, the foundation’s board proposed that I ‘resign’ because ‘it would look better for you,’ which I refused to do, and I asked the board to reveal the review report of my work.”
Bangkok Art & Culture Centre cutting back hours after government funding cut off
In May 2018, Bangkok’s governor stunned the arts community by announcing that City Hall wanted to take over the decade-old institution near Siam Square, remove all the exhibitions and turn it into a massive “coworking space.”
The nation’s artists and their patrons rallied against the attempt and in support of Pawit, a popular figure in the community. Though the city ultimately backed down, it starved the cash-strapped facility of funds.
The center is managed by a foundation which holds a contract to manage it until 2021. Although the content of the center’s exhibitions were not cited as problematic by the city, it has hosted numerous politically charged under Pawit’s stewardship, the kind of stuff that would infuriate thin-skinned egos.
As for why he was going public with his firing Tuesday, Pawit said he wants answers from the foundation’s board. He wrote that the new board that was seated May 31 fired him three months later at the end of August. Monday is his last day.
Early last year, Pawit resigned from his 25-year position as a professor in the Arts Faculty at Chulalongkorn University to take the directorship, a position meant to last four years.
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