Byline: Cassandra Naji

Shooting the past

“My idea is to document and photograph memories. If people don’t like it I don’t mind. I think a lot of my images cannot sell to the public. But I don’t care, I just want to photograph.”

It seems odd for Kim Hak to doubt his own popularity. After coming to photography at the advanced age of 27 in 2008, he has quickly become one of the most successful of the new generation of Khmer visual artists. Winner of two international prizes last year (Photo Quai, Paris and Stream Photo Asia, Bangkok), he has been featured in publications from Rome to Hong Kong; in September he will represent Cambodia in the UK’s first World Event Young Artists festival.

But self-aggrandisement does not come easily to Kim. Serious and soft-spoken, he is self-effacing almost to a fault. When questioned on the complexities of the time-space dialectic in his work, he laughs and claims: “I’m not a complicated person!” When admired for his Caravaggian mastery of chiaroscuro, he looks uncomfortable and scratches absent-mindedly at his tattoo, which reads ‘dawn light’ in Khmer.

Despite such protestations of simplicity, Kim’s photographs are a visual banquet, palimpsests interwoven with ghosts of the past, present and future. He admits to being in thrall to history, particularly as imaged through Phnom Penh’s swiftly changing cityscape: “In (my) photographs, the past and the present are documented for the future, for the benefit of the next generation to study about the city. When I photograph it is part of memory.”

This examination of mutability through the metaphor of architecture characterises much of Kim’s work, and contextualises his inclusion in Meta House’s upcoming exhibition, The New Cambodia. Part of the Free Your Minds festival 2012, sponsored by the Friedrich Naumann Foundation, the show documents the amber moment of today’s Phnom Penh, suspended between the traditional and the assertively modern. Local and international photographers such as Ma ‘Rooster’ Channara and Jeff Perigois will portray the city’s recent development, supplemented by presentations on Cambodia in flux.

Kim’s contribution to The New Cambodia encapsulates Phnom Penh’s limbic state: in the background of the photograph rise Central Market, Canadia Tower and Vattanac Tower, standing for the past, present and future of the city’s self-representation; in the foreground a lone figure, face obscured by a poised camera, attempts to freeze time’s passage.

It is testament to the complexity of Kim’s work that, despite this fascination with the temporal, what initially strikes the viewer in his photographs is the use of space and light. Photographs from past collections combine painterly composition with an acute understanding of human vulnerability. Recent series ON focuses on pensive figures caught in Phnom Penh’s most beautifully careworn buildings, the carefully composed pictorialism of the locations working dialectically with the unpredictability of the human subject.

Kim acknowledges the co-existence of the pictorial and the photographic in his work, attributing it to his creative process: “Normally I go to see the location and check the light and think about the space and the image, what the person maybe adds or how they can move in the space. The photos are between reality and fiction, past and present.”

Figuring time’s passage in this abstract, painterly way is Kim’s leitmotif. Lately he has been drawn to capturing at close range the damp walls of Kep’s ‘ghost houses.’ “Through history all these walls have been affected by nature, by trees and plants, as well as people in graffiti and gun shots, so all the history is there on the wall. Now they’re being destroyed and soon they’ll be gone forever, and they took 40 years to get here.” The photographs, which will be shown in France in 2013, convert this moment of decay into images of impressionistic beauty. Engrossed in his photographs, Kim muses: “I tried to photograph history on the wall… but this one also looks like rain far away. I try to put the fusion of art, and conceptual, and documentary in my photos. I like my photos!”

Red-faced, he remembers he is being interviewed. “It was nice talking to you. I hope you didn’t get bored.” He doesn’t need to worry: with photographs of this complexity and depth, boredom is not an option.

WHO: Kim Hak
WHAT: The New Cambodia photography exhibition
WHEN: July 24
WHERE: Meta House, #37 Sothearos Blvd
WHY: He’s poised for global greatness

 

rhymes of season

When Sok Visal touched down

in Phnom Penh in 1993, he came face to face with a city down on its luck. Torn by 20 years of internecine strife, the streets still echoed with the sounds of war: staccato trills of gunfire, the roar of UNTAC’s armoured cars. Visal, fresh from the housing projects of Paris, was also down on his luck: drinking beer, smoking weed, running with the wrong crowd. “My life wasn’t going anywhere. I had to make a choice. I came here looking for something.”

Fast forward nearly two decades. Sitting in his sleek new recording studio, discussing his record label while the trailer for his first co-directed feature film plays in the background, Visal seems to be a man who has found what he was looking for. His story of a Cambodian boy made good is, in one way, the story of Cambodia itself. As Visal comes into his creative prime as music producer, festival organiser, film director and all round urban mogul, Phnom Penh is experiencing a cultural renaissance similar to that of the swinging ‘60s, Cambodia’s ‘golden age.’

By the mid ‘70s of course, the Golden Age was over. In 1975 Visal’s parents fled the encroaching KR cadres, first to a Thai refugee camp then on to France. Moving from housing project to housing project, Visal struggled in school and became increasingly drawn to urban sub-culture. “At night I was sneaking out onto the streets to do graffiti. At one point my mother got scared I was turning bad, I got into trouble for vandalism and stuff. She got scared of losing me, so she sent me to the States.”

Like so many Khmer refugees, he discovered the States wasn’t all apple pie. “I thought I’d find the American dream like on the TV, but it wasn’t like that. I left the housing project in France only to land in a Khmer community where everyone was on welfare, gambling, kind of a mess.” He credits graffiti and hip hop with helping him survive.

When he returned to France he carried on rapping and tagging round the banlieues. “I didn’t have a job; I was hanging around smoking weed. But I felt I wasn’t born for that, I felt I was more of an artist. So I came back to Cambodia.”

Restarting life wasn’t easy, but once again hip hop saved him: “While I was working I was hanging around with a bunch of Khmer American returnees, ex-gangsters from Long Beach, and we listened to rap every night.” One of the guys, DJ Sop, became the first person to produce a Khmer hip hop album, combining industry beats with Khmer rappers. I wished I coulda been part of it. But I had a lot of personal problems in those days…”

So Visal kept his head down, quietly remixed Sop’s tracks and got his life back on track. Finally, he was ready. “In 2004 I produced my first album. I don’t know if it went well, but… it went! I just made a few copies of the album and gave it away, it wasn’t a business. The whole thing was just to help us get down with the edgy kids, the kids who loved hip hop. It started to get big. And that was the start of Klap Ya Handz.”

Less of a record label, more of a creative collective of hip hop crazy kids, KYH has a sound all its own. Reworking Khmer pop from the 1960s and ’70s, KYH is determinedly local: “If you listen to most of my mixes I try to keep a very traditional sound. I don’t use a bit of Khmer sample and turn it into gangsta hip hop. My music has the sound of the Khmer beat, the sarawan beat, the sound of Cambodia.” Listening to tracks by Klap Ya Handz alumni like Kdep, Khmer Rap Boyz and Pu Khlaing is a schizophonic experience, oscillating between Khmer Wall of Sound samples and brownstone beats, quickfire rap weaving through the rhythm like a rush-hour moto. And although he’s now diversifying the sound, “mixing Khmer music with bossa and reggae and jazz,” Visal is adamant about one thing: “It has to remain edgy, and that means staying urban. We don’t want to go pop and flowers and bubblegum. We don’t want to go… K-pop.” He seems disgusted at the thought.

True to these urban roots, Visal is organising Rise Up II in October, an all day mash-up of live hip hop from the likes of Dollah and Prolyfik, as well as dance-offs, rap-offs and art events. “The first Rise Up (2010) was about showing people we were here. Now it’s about showing people there is an alternative. You have another choice, an original sound home-grown in Cambodia. You don’t have to listen to… K-pop.” More disgust.

Possibly to provide a further alternative to the spectre of Korean ditties, Visal set up his film production company, 391 Films, in 2009. Three years later, Comfortably Lost, a feature film on which he was first assistant director, is piquing the interest of distributors in Cannes. The story of a disenchanted American photographer who comes to Cambodia and sees life through Cambodian eyes, Comfortably Lost obviously fills Visal with pride. “For me it’s a road movie – in fact it’s probably the first Cambodian road movie! The hero finds inspiration in Cambodia. But he’s not the main guy, really. The main characters are the Khmer people and the scenery, the country itself. It’s a very positive film, it moves away from the clichés of the killing fields and the Khmer Rouge.”

For Visal, these tired and tiring clichés misrepresent today’s Cambodia: “People shouldn’t forget about those things but it’s time to move forward. I believe Khmer people have art in their blood. I don’t think they were made to go to war; they’re artists before everything else. They are musicians, architects, painters and dancers: I don’t think they were born to do anything but that.”

Visal leans back in his chair and winds up the interview. “There’s something going on right now… and this is only the beginning.” Welcome to the Golden Age.

WHO: Sok Visal
WHAT: Urban media mogulWHERE: Phnom Penh
WHEN: The Second Golden Age (or, more specifically, Rise Up 2 in October)
WHY: Home-grown hip hop

 

Cinema enigma

In the year of the new millennium, Wilfried Agricola was reborn. Struck down by art terrorists in 1998, the artist formerly known as Wilfried re-emerged from his creative death as video activist, curator, exhibition designer, festival director and media maestro. To mark his reincarnation from mere mortal to multimedia art brand he gave himself a new identity: Agricola de Cologne.

This choice of nomenclature is perhaps as obfuscatory as faking one’s own death. In the pantheon of Roman heroes, Gnaes Julius Agricola rarely features highly, being best remembered as the man who tamed the intransigent Scots before returning home to Rome to die in his bed. Had it not been for son-in-law Tacitus’ laudatory biography The Life and Death of Agricola, the general might well have fallen out of collective memory.

Which begs the question: why would an enigmatic video artist from Germany’s fourth city choose to go by this elusively allusive nom d’arte? Far from having martial designs on Celtic climes, the artist is in fact channelling Renaissance humanist tradition. Four hundred years ago it was common for educated Germans to give their names a Classical make-over: thus the Teutonic Bauer, or farmer, becomes the latinised Agricola. So the erstwhile Bauer was the latter day humanist Wilfried, before transmogrifying into the chimerical Agricola de Cologne. As the mysterious man behind the brand helpfully explains, “‘Agricola de Cologne’ is an artist brand, as well as a brand for his art, and as such ‘Agricola de Cologne’ as a manifestation as an artist is purely virtual, representing the only true virtual artist.” Confused? Probably.

This fascination with historical inference and reappropriated identity is central to the work Agricola de Cologne is presenting as part of Meta House’s Free Your Minds Festival. A Virtual Memorial Phnom Penh 2012 is a four-day programme of unconventional film shorts and experimental video works, examining the concept of collective memory and identity in post-totalitarian countries.

The idea for A Virtual Memorial was born not in Cambodia, but in a country which couldn’t seem more distant: Latvia. This Baltic outpost may be snowier and more Slavic than Cambodia, but the countries share a similarly tragic recent past. Both are associated with the most notorious genocides of the last century: an estimated 1.5 million Cambodians died at the hands of the Khmer Rouge; Nazi-occupied Latvia saw 200,000 of its citizens murdered in concentration camps and on the frontline as conscripts. And both are only now coming to acknowledge the scale of these disasters, with Khmer Rouge history recently introduced into school curricula and the first Holocaust museum opening in Riga.

It is this grim commonality which led Agricola de Cologne to take A Virtual Memorial to both Phnom Penh and Riga. Last month, the Latvian capital became the first city to host the exhibition, which makes use of video art as well as lectures, workshops, courses, exhibitions, artist talks and discussions. Interspersing short films with interactive elements, Agricola leads participants to actively engage with A Virtual Memorial, ultimately considering “how people coming from different cultural, religious, social, political or ethnic backgrounds deal with memory and the essential questions of life”.

The questions asked by the event – how should art render history and memory? How does history affect the future self? – are reminiscent of Heideggerian ontological theory, in which a human being is born into the past and must make an effort of free will to recreate identity based on this inescapable history. Agricola de Cologne, aiming to “sensitise and activate the audience… to keep memory vivid,” asks his audiences to seize control of its collective memory, using past national identities to create a more hopeful future; power is taken from totalitarians and restored to the populace through art. Perhaps self-directed rebirth and renaming are not quite so obfuscatory after all.

A Virtual Memorial Phnom Penh will run between the 12th- 15th of the month, before moving to Warsaw and Vilnius.

WHO: Agricola de Cologne
WHAT: A Virtual Memorial Phnom Penh
WHERE: Meta House, #37 Sothearos Blvd, and sister locations around Phnom Penh
WHEN: July 12 – 15
WHY: Unconventional cinema

 

Going, going……. gone?

It isn’t just Ty and his football team who are concerned about the mooted development of Phnom Penh’s Olympic Stadium. A cathedral to Khmer creativity, the sports complex is a place of pilgrimage for photographers, students, architects and enthusiasts, as well as the myriad joggers, wrestlers and petanquers who make use of its facilities. A perfect marriage of form and function, the structure and its future are as much a matter for sportsmen as they are for urban planners.

Commissioned by Prince Norodom Sihanouk in the salad days of Cambodian independence, the complex was a concrete metaphor for the kingdom’s post-colonial rebirth. At the 1964 opening ceremony, Prince Sihanouk assured his subjects: “We have certainly shown the world that we are not a bastard nation deprived of intelligence, courage and energy, as the enemies of our people and our country have often pretended. Despite the criticism and slander of some of our neighbours and their imperialist masters we have proven our capacity to transform our ancient kingdom into a modern nation.” Stadium architect Vann Molyvann, interviewed by The Wall Street Journal in 2010, remembered that night as “one of the greatest moments of my life”.

Out of this newfound hope and confidence rose New Khmer architecture, a uniquely Cambodian interpretation of architectural modernism, combining slick Le Corbusian esotericism with Khmer guts. Typified by natural lighting and ventilation systems, Angkorian irrigation features, and streamlined vernacular motifs, the style works in harmony with the meteorological extremes of its birthplace. From social housing in Bassac to the (now demolished) Council of Ministers, Sihanouk and Molyvann, the urbane prince and the Sorbonne-educated architect, used New Khmer architecture to transform the city from a sleepy riparian outpost into the modern capital of a country on the ascendant.

But the halcyon days were short. From 1975 to 1979 the outlying sports fields were turned into cabbage patches and Khmer Rouge cadres marched through the arena. The complex fell further into desuetude during the decades of civil strife and occupation; it was only in 2000 that the site was returned to something resembling its former state by a Taiwanese firm, who revivified the stadium on the condition of their entitlement to develop pockets of the periphery for commercial use.

Recently, rumours surfaced claiming that the regeneration was poised to leap from ‘development’ to demolition. While these unconfirmed reports have been energetically refuted by the city Municipality, there’s no denying that the complex is about to undergo a radical make-over, with a cluster of skyscrapers – one 55 storeys high – set to rise up over the low-slung skyline. And despite intentions to protect the stadium, the encroaching development is rumoured to have sorely compromised water run-off, leading to the flooding of surrounding roads and the weakening of the structure’s foundations.

For Dr Dougald O’Reilly, founder of non-profit Heritage Watch International, the rapid reimagining of Phnom Penh’s cityscape has wide-ranging ramifications for inhabitants. “Filling in blank spaces with skyscrapers is ill-advised. The architectural landscape of Cambodia is a testament to the dramatic history of the country stretching over thousands of years. It would be unthinkable to tear down Tuol Sleng and the same should be said of more recently built jewels of Khmer ingenuity. There is a need to develop Phnom Penh, but a crucial part of that development should be an attempt to keep the city liveable and attractive.”

These jewels of Khmer ingenuity are some of the city’s best kept secrets, overwritten by the new face of new Phnom Penh. The architecturally curious are catered for by Khmer

Architecture Tours, who run fortnightly excursions to post-independence buildings such as

Vann Molyvann’s sleek Royal University complex and the stately 1960s villas of Tuol Kork, as well as regular guided walks of Olympic Stadium. The tours provide an opportunity to see the crumbling structures before they sink below the glass and chrome shards of

architectural progress.

As Ty and his teammates kick up and down the Olympic scale football pitch, the echoes of construction bounce off the bleachers. The stadium may have been reprieved for now, but development forges onwards and defiantly upwards on every side.

WHO: Khmer Architecture Tours (ka-tours.org)
WHAT: Guided walks of Olympic Stadium and other architectural gems
WHERE: Around Phnom Penh
WHEN: Fortnightly
WHY: You don’t know what you’ve got ‘til it’s gone

 

The meaning of life

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

 

Creativity, Coffee and Conflict

The stage is black. A distant tinkling is the only sound, resembling nothing so much as crockery clinking against crockery. The lights go up slowly. Crockery: a heaped morass of over 1,000 coffee cups slithering upstage seemingly with a mind of its own. Then, to the accompaniment of stark chords on an electric guitar, a hooded man emerges from the cup mountain and crawls face down towards the audience. Strange, surreal, sexy – it’s contemporary dance, but not as we know it. This is Kawa (‘coffee’ in Arabic), a performance exploring creative angst and the Arab Spring through the metaphor of everyone’s favourite morning beverage.

“We wanted to transfer the idea of making an espresso to our own situation as artists,” explains Hafiz Dhaou, co-choreographer of Chatha Dance Company by day, dancer crushed beneath coffee cups by night. Both the coffee-making and the creative process, according to Dhaou, involve the compression of a base product, be it coffee grains or personal experience, and the extraction of a palatable product. Performance, art, espresso, “it’s all about some form of pressure.”

Dhaou and his partner (in choreography and in life) Aicha M’Barek know something about the pressures brought to bear on today’s transcultural artists. Since founding Chatha in 2005 they have performed worldwide, taking their challenging interpretation of dance to theatres far-flung from their homes in Lyon and Tunis. In 2011 they choreographed an ensemble piece for the Ballet de Lorraine, France; 12 months later they are bringing Kawa, their one man show, to Phnom Penh. The Tunisian team does not shy away from pressure, apparently.

Kawa explores the effect of this pressure on the artist through its expressionist choreography. The piece “explores the body’s possibilities for generating movement without relying on established forms of dance”, creating an alternative gestural lexicon of movement. Dhaou spends most of the performance spinning skittishly in circles, orbiting the stage with hands clamped over his ears, or standing with his back to the audience. Such dramaturgical techniques smack of Bertolt Brecht’s political theatre, throwing out the traditional semiological system and forcing observers to engage critically in an attempt to understand the strange phenomenon unfolding on stage.

These Brechtian shadows imply a deeper layer of meaning to Kawa. As Dhaou shakes and shrugs between the coffee cups, a recording of Mahmoud Darwich, exiled Palestinian writer and member of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation, recites a poetic paean to coffee. As the poem makes way for melancholy electronica the dancer’s movements become spasmodic, as if he were being rent by polar forces; he resembles a man internally at war, although the reasons for this conflict are difficult for the observer’s naked eye to determine. Dhaou arranges the coffee cups strategically around the stage, constricting and demarking the once open space. As he places each cup carefully in position, he locates them as on a map – Beirut, Tripoli, Amman. The contrast between the meticulous placing of the cups and Dhaou’s body in constant flux creates a tension of immiscible forces contained within the same constricted space.

Although Dhaou and M’Barek are reluctant to describe their choreography as “political”, an audience faced with a Tunisian dancer writhing to the rhythm of a Palestinian poem inevitably reaches for wider meaning. At a recent festival in Berlin, Dhaou rejected the role of spokesman for the internecine strife sweeping across the Arab world, steering the conversation towards the question of the artist in society. But it’s hard not to see Kawa as both an expression of internal conflict and current political upheaval: the body as metaphor for nation state, united in form but continually in flux, searching for a way to balance conflicting forces while maintaining its original identity. Kawa is substantially deeper than your average cup of espresso.

WHO: Chatha Dance Company
WHAT: Kawa, solo contemporary dance
WHERE: Chenla Theatre
WHEN: 7pm June 8
WHY: Dancing up a storm in a coffee cup

 

Proud & Loud

In May 1885, notorious Irish writer Oscar Wilde was definitely ‘out’. Convicted of gross indecency, he was sentenced to two years’ hard labour as penance for his homosexuality. As he was taken from the dock, Wilde asked the judge: “And I? May I say nothing?” The answer, apparently, was no; the trial’s spectators silenced Wilde with cries of “Shame!” Outted, certainly. Proud and loud… unhappily not.

Fast forward 117 years to Cambodia May 2012, and the last thing on anyone’s mind is shame or silence. Since 2009 the Kingdom’s LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender) community has celebrated being ‘same same but different’ proudly and loudly with Gay Pride Week. Pride mixes activism, art and a week-long party, turning up the volume on those whose voices were previously marginalised and muted.

The unacknowledged silence frequently imposed on LGBT culture is examined and challenged by New Girl Law, a collaborative work by American writer/artist Anne Elizabeth Moore and a group of young Cambodian women. The work lays down 20 ‘new girl laws’ promoting gender equity for women in Cambodia, whatever their sexual orientation. In 2011 these ‘laws’ were published as a book, complete with an audio piece of the creation process.

Then the silencing began: first the audio was censored in the United States; then the laws themselves were disavowed by some of the very women with whom Moore had worked; finally, Moore herself has ‘censored’ New Girl Law for its Meta House premiere, blanking out the most controversial statements and leaving silent spaces throughout the exhibition. So what happened to being proud out loud?

“Demanding space for silence is my way of reminding people to listen,” explains Moore. “Maybe people will hear other voices. Once you begin to note where silence occurs, it becomes easier to see who is failing to be invited to speak.” However, Moore refuses to see her work as a clarion call for gender queer rights, bristling when asked if she agrees with the description of New Girl Law as ‘an account of teaching free speech where it’s least wanted’: “No, not at all. I guess it depends on who you ask.”

Picking up on the quiet questions posed by New Girl Law, the exhibition is designed to turn passive viewers into active participants. While part of the space is inhabited by New Girl Law, the show also features a Pride 2012 zine made by lesbian groups in Cambodia, and a ‘creative corner’ packed with zine-making materials. Exhibition-goers are encouraged to respond to the works around them by making their own zines or contributing to a larger group piece; by the close of Gay Pride Week this organic work will be hung alongside New Girl Law. And to those nay-sayers at the back asking “But is it Art??” (yes, you know who you are), Moore has a riposte ready: “Art is not possible without action. So of course, if you have some self-published work on the wall, you will also want to create a space for people to make their own. Why not?”

Exhibition curator Roger Nelson agrees, emphasising that the blurring of genres and forms “adds to our experience as audiences, and adds to the power and potential of both art and activism.” Nelson hopes that this admixture of art and action will lead to “conversation and dialogue – between artists, artworks and audiences – one of the primary functions of art and exhibitions”.

The exhibition therefore has a tidy circularity: acknowledging the historical silencing of LGBT culture, challenging you to engage with this silence, and creating a forum for everyone, gay, straight or curious, to make their voice heard. As Nelson says, “LGBT communities have so much to be proud of and so much to offer. They need to express this in each and every way they can.” Oscar Wilde would have been proud.

WHO: Anne Elizabeth Moore
WHAT: Conversations with Proud People
WHERE: Metahouse downstairs gallery
WHEN: May 11
WHY: If you’re out, you’re in

Dish: Khmer coffee highs

There’s no denying it: Phnom Penhites just want to get high. At this very moment in the city’s most salubrious neighbourhoods people are clamouring for hits from the bong faster than the poor bongs can keep up, and the only high worth chasing is of the caffeinated variety. With the approximately two square miles of BKK1 now overloaded with ‘Western-style’ coffee shops, most coffee drinkers, Cambodian as well as expat, seem to be eschewing the traditional brew in favour of frappuccinos, free wifi and, God save us all, endless Michael Buble ear-assaults. The real Cambodian cup of coffee seems in danger of disappearing into this vortex of naff.

For although it can in no way claim the fame of its drippy Vietnamese neighbour, nor indeed the notoriety of that same nation’s ‘weasel coffee’, Cambodia does indeed have a national brew, grown on the red earth of the North Eastern provinces, roasted and enjoyed in its own unique fashion throughout the Kingdom.

Introduced during the French era alongside those two other Cs, croissants and colonialism, the coffee grown in Cambodia is mainly of the ‘Robusta’ variety, which is in flavour somewhat robuster (ba-boom! I’m here all week, folks) than the more highly prized Arabica. These days, according to Phnom Penh-based roasters Three Corner Coffee, around 70%  of beans grown on Cambodian soil end up in the hands of Vietnamese middle-men, whence they are sold across the border and used to bulk up Vietnamese produce.

Luckily, some coffee contrives to remain in-country, ensuring you can find the authentic cup of Khmer coffee if you’re willing to try hard enough. Keep your eyes peeled as dawn breaks and you’ll see tin drums full of steadily blackening beans lining the roadside, with the occasional lump of pig fat bobbling merrily in the mix. Once charred, the beans are hand-ground into fine dust and then poured into the glamorously named ‘coffee sock’, a muslin bag through which boiled water is poured up to three times. The coffee is then ready to pour over the requisite spoonage of condensed milk. For Cambodian coffee can be taken hot or iced, but only a madman takes it without a dollop of My Boy milk; no questions asked, it’s just the way it is.

Curiously, in that very heartland of pseudo-European coffee-shops, BKK1, there exist two mom and pop places defiantly roasting and boiling their own coffee. You have to get up early to catch Mr Dol on Street 51 and 322, whose blue plastic chairs and floral tables unfold with the dawn and whose roasting is done while most of us are still abed. His syrupy 2,000 riel shots come with free Chinese tea and your choice of pork and rice or, well, pork and rice. A little further south working the corners of BKK market there’s Mrs Nuon, who runs a one-woman mobile operation that roasts, grinds, boils and serves all at once, with never a cessation in conversation from clientele or proprietress.

Further afield, a morning cruise round the streets south of Toul Tom Pong market allows you to follow your nose to places that are roasting their own. Should this fail-safe method fail, head for the hole-in-the-wall cafe at the intersection of streets 432 and 163, where roasting pig fat and free-flow condensed milk never smelled so good. And if you’re not an early-riser there’s always Mr Bounnareth’s coffee stall inside the market itself, identifiable by its inexplicable Brazilian flags and jovial owner. While Mr Bounnareth undeniably serves up a deliciously thick and strong double shot for only a dollar, be warned: he and his establishment are teetering on the brink of self-parody. Catch him and his coffee before tradition becomes farce and you have to contend with hordes of snap-happy tourists just to get your iced coffee.

Mr Dol, Street 51 (cnr Street 322)
Mrs Nuon, mobile coffee cart, BKK Market
Cafe, Street 432 (cnr Street 163)
Mrs Bounnareth’s stall, Russian Market