Freedom. This one little word has kept the greatest brains in world history whirring for over 2,000 years. From Ancient Greece to modern day France, Western philosophers have chewed over the paradoxical nature of freedom. The concept implies individual free will, the ability to exercise voluntary action or inaction. But with this freedom comes the burden of responsibility: the freer man is to choose his actions, the more responsibility he bears for their consequences. As Sartre pithily grumbled, “man is condemned to be free”.
Canonical wordsmiths have scarcely been more enthusiastic about liberty. Wordsworth worried that freedom could prove ‘tiring,’ and Kafka warned that it was sometimes easier to be in chains. Freedom, in Eurocentric thought, is something of a poisoned chalice.
Next month, Phnom Penh’s Meta House will be putting an altogether more attractive spin on being free. “Freedom is the meaning of life,” Meta House’s Nico Mesterharm assures the sceptics. “We want to find out how important freedom is for Cambodians. We want to encourage Cambodian artists to express their ideas freely and share them with our audience.”
It’s this desire that led Meta House to inaugurate the Free Your Minds Festival, a month-long event incorporating varying creative formats – videos, paintings, installations and performance – from artists from nine countries around the globe. Mesterharm hopes that this cultural melee will “trigger a creative dialogue on how to overcome constraints and further develop the country”.
In the spirit of confounding constraints, Free Your Minds has an assertively free-wheeling format. Based at Meta House and sponsored by the Friedrich Neumann Foundation, Free Your Minds exhibits will also spring up at Top Gallery, Old Meta House and Botanic Café. New films by international and Khmer media-makers will be shown alongside painting and photography exhibitions; community arts projects will run throughout the festival, as well as speaker events and performances. As Mesterharm explains when asked about the plethora of genres being showcased, “a festival about ‘freedom’ has to grant all artists full artistic freedom. So no guidelines at all, just a loose framework…”.
Contributing to that loose framework is Global Hybrid, a dialogue and exhibition between film makers, performance artists, visual artists, photographers and writers from around the world. Having shown at Meta House for the past four years, Global Hybrid 2012 explores the notion of identity in a globalised world through the works of nine Khmer and international artists. Sokuntevy Oeur, vanguard of the Kingdom’s up-and-coming generation of female artists, exhibits paintings which consider freedom in love; her works are juxtaposed with those of Vietnamese painter UuDam Nguyen, whose Love Buttons installation examines the same theme from a male perspective. Thus a dialogue is produced between two artists of different genders from different countries who have never met.
North American sculptor Denise A. Scott, who has been the curatorial mastermind behind Global Hybrid since 2008, believes that building these connections between South-East artists and their international counterparts constitutes a “step towards establishing a global artistic dialogue, creating a future for Khmer and International Artists that transcends cultures and disciplines”.
According to Mesterharm, this sense of transcendence epitomises Free Your Minds 2012. “The event means artists learn to free their minds of traditions and prejudices; they learn that artists all over the world struggle for freedom under different conditions, but that this struggle makes them stronger and leads to stronger artworks. They find a common language, although they come from different parts of the world. After all, art can break all boundaries.”
WHO: Artists from Cambodia and beyond
WHAT: Free Your Minds Festival 2012
WHERE: Meta House, #37 Sothearos Blvd, and sister locations around Phnom Penh
WHEN: July 2012
WHY: Freedom is the meaning of life