In the year 450BC, Confucius conveyed a message that, thousands of years later, is still astonishingly valid: “Tell me and I’ll forget; show me and I may remember; involve me and I’ll understand.” Performance: this is one of the new artistic trends gaining ground in Cambodia. Until March 21, involve yourself in 17 performance videos by 10 Cambodian artists in Phnom Penh: Rescue Archaeology, The Body and the Lens in the City.
Says Curator Erin Gleeson: “Video art here is actually a way to share and document a performance. The artists of this exhibition are very different, but they all act like rescue archaeologists: namely, someone who reacts urgently yet carefully to a transitional moment in which there is a threat of irrevocable loss, aside from archaeologists’ efforts to document. During a critical time of rapid urban, social, economic and cultural change and continuity in Phnom Penh, Cambodian artists are working with a sense of urgency in response to the fluctuating urban present.”
Continuity, change, loss and destruction are the main themes. Many draw attention to Boeung Kak’s recent history and the filling of the lake in the wake of mass forced evictions. Leang Seckon, personally touched by the event, choreographed a poetic performance shortly before being evicted from his own home in 2010. In the video, a group of men on a boat are trying to save a symbolic fish. When they discover it’s already dead they perform a funeral ritual: dressing themselves, the fish and the soon-to-be-demolished home in white. As the sun goes down, they hold a touching cremation ceremony atop the sand.
Another interesting yet tragicomic performance is Khvay Samnang’s Newspaper Man. Here, the artist – swathed in Khmer newspapers – walks blindly where the waters of the lake once lapped, tripping over the remnants of long-toppled houses. “Since the local press ignored news about the lake, I used my body to write about it,” he says. Questioned by puzzled police once, he replied: “I am selling newspapers. Business people always think ahead. You are developing this place and I am here first.”
Then there’s Svay Sareth and his sculpture, Mon Boulet (‘My Ball Enchained’). The artist drags this huge, heavy metal sphere from Siem Reap to Phnom Penh over a regenerative five days’ of travelling 250km. “His work, it’s really about catharsis,” says Gleeson of this modern-day Sisyphus who believes that if only Cambodians could demonstrate more openly the ‘weight’ of their past traumas, they would be able to move forward.
WHO: Aspiring urban archaeologists
WHAT: Phnom Penh: Rescue Archaeology exhibition, screening and book launch
WHERE: Sa Sa Bassac Gallery, #18 (second floor) Sothearos Blvd.
WHEN: 6pm February 28 (screening), March 15 (book launch) and March 21 (screening)
WHY: We built this city