Archive Room, 2025 by Wantanee Siripattananuntakul

Archive Room is a mixed-media installation spanning three interconnected rooms. It assembles documents, photographs, and objects accumulated through years of living with Beuys, the artist’s African Grey parrot. Veterinary reports, import and quarantine papers, microchip records, ownership declarations, and bureaucratic classifications sit alongside toys, food packaging, medical supplies, feathers, and traces of domestic wear. Together, they form a record of a shared life that is continuously translated into proof.

The archive exposes the systems that structure Beuys’s existence: care, attention, and companionship on one hand, and legality, surveillance, risk management, and economic labour on the other. Each document demands verification of species, ownership, and health. Each object points to the continuous work required to sustain another body within human infrastructures of control.

Under contemporary regulatory systems, care becomes inseparable from administration. To care is to document, to comply, and to translate affection into acceptable forms of evidence. Intimacy is reorganised into files, forms, and procedures. Beuys exists within the work as an autonomous presence, yet institutional systems continue to frame her as a regulated subject.

The accumulation of papers and objects does not stabilise identity or ownership. It places care within structures of control, responsibility, and vulnerability.