Bangkok Street Art and Graffiti

Australian by birth, Rupert Mann is an architectural and cultural heritage specialist, writer, and photographer. He has worked with indigenous communities in Australia and remote tribal groups in Papua New Guinea, has excavated Bronze-Age and Byzantine burials in Cyprus, and was a co-founder of the community-based lobby group Melbourne Heritage Action, which campaigned successfully for the City of Melbourne to upgrade its heritage lists and strategies. Rupert has lived in China, where he trained with a Beijing circus, and currently lives in Yangon, Myanmar, where he works with the Yangon Heritage Trust and recently co-authored the Yangon Heritage Strategy. He has done several photographic series that focus on neglected urban heritage, including a portrait of Kuala Lumpur’s infamous Pudu jail days before it was demolished, and a record of Bangkok’s Hopewell street pillars recently removed during an upgrade of the city’s railway network. Prison Pentridge in Australia, where the fascinating nexus between, place, people, memory and change is powerfully legible, has intrigued him since childhood. His body of work devoted to the prison represents the culmination of a nine-year project to ensure that its history is not buried during redevelopment.