Silverlens in New York is presenting Torrents of Rain, the first exhibition by Jakkai Siributr with the gallery, on view from 5 November to 19 December 2026. The show brings together assemblages of fabrics, tchotchkes, beads and personal memorabilia, with an accompanying text by Brian Curtin.

The exhibition is about how loss and grief never truly fade. Memories persist, the gallery notes, carrying a discomforting sense of the uncanny, at once personal and political. Curtin's essay draws on Joan Didion's memoir The Year of Magical Thinking, on the writings of Thich Nhat Hanh, and on the idea of animism as a practice of boundary-making: between the real and the fictional, the rational and the irrational, the self and the other.

The works build on Siributr's long excavation of his aristocratic family's history. An earlier installation, 18/28: the Singhaseni Tapestries from 2017–18, was made from his late mother's clothes after her death in 2015, and her extensive diaries opened up a portrait of many past lives in the family, intersecting with Thailand's troubled road to modernity: military coups, deadly civilian protests, and a relative judicially executed in the 1950s over alleged involvement in the death of King Rama VIII, in proceedings that have been described as a kangaroo court.

New works continue that reckoning. Even Rain Becomes Cloud from 2026 pictures the artist's ancestors and other beloveds in the form of amulets, while Golden and 8:00AM, both 2026, are portraits of his parents, and 1951 takes its title from the year the family home was built. Earlier pieces such as Yellow Fever and Black Death, both 2021, turn the same attention to Covid-19 and the longer, racialised histories of virus and disease. Siributr grew up on the spirit-filled streets of Bangkok, where spirit houses, shrines and devotional offerings are part of everyday life, and that animist world runs through everything he makes.