Ioana Vrabie brings 'The Flight' to Bangkok in first solo Southeast Asia show
The Barcelona-based artist's exhibition at The Charoen AArt explores displacement and belonging through sculpture and installation
The Charoen AArt in Bangkok is presenting 'The Flight,' a new solo exhibition by Barcelona-based artist Ioana Vrabie, marking her inaugural presentation in Southeast Asia. The show engages with themes of displacement, belonging, and the contested nature of home through a body of work combining sculpture, installation, and mixed media.
Vrabie's practice operates at the intersection of personal narrative and collective memory, drawing on her own experience of migration and cultural dislocation. Her work frequently interrogates how physical spaces become repositories of identity, and how the domestic sphere—typically understood as a site of comfort and stability—can simultaneously embody loss and estrangement. The exhibition's title, 'The Flight,' references both the act of departure and the sensations of floating, weightlessness, and liminality that accompany displacement.
The Bangkok venue positions Vrabie's work within regional conversations about labour migration, diaspora, and the reconfiguration of family structures across Southeast Asia. The Charoen AArt, situated at 71 Sukhumvit Road, has established itself as a platform for contemporary artists exploring social and political dimensions of visual culture. This exhibition represents an expansion of the gallery's programming beyond the Thai and regional Asian artists who have dominated its schedule, introducing an international perspective to audiences in the Thai capital.
Vrabie studied at the Escola Massana in Barcelona and has exhibited widely across Europe, with recent presentations at institutions including galleries in Madrid and Berlin. Her work has been acquired by public and private collections, and she has participated in residencies that have taken her across multiple continents. By bringing her practice to Bangkok, The Charoen AArt suggests an emerging appetite among regional galleries to engage with diaspora-centred narratives and the work of artists whose practices speak to transnational conditions.
The exhibition operates within a broader contemporary moment in which questions of home, belonging, and permanent displacement have become central to artistic discourse globally. As climate change, economic inequality, and geopolitical conflict continue to reshape patterns of migration and settlement worldwide, artists like Vrabie are articulating the psychological and material dimensions of these upheavals through formal experimentation and conceptual rigour.
'The Flight' will remain on view through August at The Charoen AArt, 71 Sukhumvit Road, Bangkok. The exhibition offers Bangkok audiences an opportunity to encounter a mature artistic voice engaging with experiences of precarity and reimagination that resonate across borders and cultures.
Based on a press release distributed by globenewswire; full original at https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2026/05/26/3301341/0/en/The-Charoen-AArt-Unveils-The-Flight-by-Ioana-Vrabie-in-Bangkok.html.