After a long scarcity of cultural exchange between Bangkok and Phnom Penh, it seems like the two cities have found a common currency. Rates of Exchange, Un-Compared is a six-month collaborative project hosted by Sa Sa Bassac gallery in which six Thai and three Cambodian artists were invited to partake in discussions, symposiums and residencies. As well as creating the resulting exhibition, the project aimed to create a dialogue between artists from the two capital cities.
The exhibition curators, Roger Nelson and Brian Curtin, discouraged comparative frameworks – instead, the artists also examine the ways in which we talk about nationality, history and geography.
“It seemed as though most artists were so used to curators presenting them with a ‘theme’ to ‘respond to,’” Nelson says. “I think that can often be quite a problematic idea, so it confirmed for me that this project was a worthwhile experiment. We were lucky to work with people who are bursting with exciting ideas, and who thrive on the chance to share those ideas, and learn from the different thinking and practices of others.”
For this show, the process was just as valuable as the result. “The artists, curators, researchers and spaces involved in the project made the connections happen, and it was really nice to watch that unfold,” Nelson continues. “The conversations really varied from artist to artist. Some artists were interested in talking about the similarities and differences in Thailand and Cambodia, both past and present – in a sense, comparing the two cities and nations. Other artists were more interested in talking about the abstract idea of thinking about comparison as a mode of analysis.”
Instead of working around a theme, the show largely defines itself in its own terms with a mishmash of multi-textured playfulness.
Delicate processes, violent histories
Recurring ideas create internal echoes within the gallery. On one wall, Orawan Arunrak has hung a jacket belonging to her late godfather, a soldier deployed to protect Cambodian refugees after the Khmer Rouge regime collapsed. The artist has lovingly stitched the camouflage outlines with gold thread – an act of deification, symbolic of family and national ties.
On the other side of the gallery, Tada Hengsapkul’s video installation mirrors Arunrak’s piece: it shows a close-up of the soft folds of an American soldier’s jacket from the ‘60s. American military presence during that era is still officially denied by Thailand – despite the eyewitness memories of local people, and physical evidence of jackets such as these.
Hengsapkul’s installation shows the image of the jacket woozily dissolving into yellow and purple streaks as it is chemically cleansed from the screen – just as it has been cleansed from Thailand’s historical records. As with Arunrak, the slow, delicate process he has employed is at odds with the artefact itself, which is evidence of the two countries’ traumatic history of war.
“Local history is interesting and seems even more important than national history, which was written and rewritten by governments, and which shows the government controls people with its power,” Hengsapkul says. “I think most artists don’t see its significance, lost in the repeated words created by the government. If no one talks about it, everything will slowly and gradually disappear, and nobody’s going to even notice it. Moreover, we can learn from mistakes in many dimensions of social structure through history.”
Unexpected mediums
The politicised symbol of the jacket is repeated again by Thai artist Jakkai Siributr, but this time in the context of the monolithic garment industry. Siributr’s installation Fast Fashion consists of a set of H&M jackets embroidered with slogans and scenes from Cambodian garment protests. The painstaking detail and care given to each garment is in itself a protest against cheap, throwaway fashion.
It’s hard not to read his piece as a twist on the trend of “reclaimed fashion” – his work is not only recycling clothes, but literally reclaiming them as Cambodian products, with their palimpsests of traditional Yantra texts and scenes of recent political strife. In a further sense, they function as portraits of the unseen artists of the pieces: the factory workers who made them.
Indeed, the exhibition explores unexpected mediums with a beguiling lightness of touch. Even the most apparently conventional pieces, such as the two dark canvases by Imhathai Suwatthanasilp are marked with delicate, contoured patterns, which on closer inspection reveal themselves to be made with human hair.
A sheet of newspaper lies on the floor, as if it blew there accidentally. This, too, reveals an uncanny surprise as it twitches and moves mechanically. The artist, Makha Sanewong Na Ayuthaya, is known for his un-still lives, animating everyday objects, such as paint buckets, toothpaste tubes and bottle caps. Aside from producing the visceral discomfort that comes from seeing an ordinarily still object animated, the artist aims to jolt us from our blindness to functional objects by making them into kinetic sculptures.
Ayuthaya’s piece in Sa Sa Bassac, simply titled Newspaper, isn’t just questioning the hierarchy of function over form. On the front page of the newspaper is a story on the country’s most recent coup – the 19th in Thailand’s recent history – while the back page holds an ad for a SIM card and a promotion for watching free movies. The Thai media distracts people from the precarious reality of their political situation; Newspaper scuttles discarded, cockroach-like on the ground.
Exploration, conversation
Phnom Penh’s geography is thoroughly travelled. Cambodian artist Khvay Samnang examines the cities socio-political issues, with a photo series of traditional fighters posing in front of Phnom Penh’s violently changing skylines. Kanitha Tith, an artist who has so far focused on performance art, shows video work for the first time. Exploring the concepts of time and familiarity, the video is a fragmented tour of Phnom Penh’s White Building, which dissolves from the everyday to inky ambiguity as night falls in its long corridors. Pen Sereypagna’s maps of Phnom Penh hang on the wall and across the floor. People have filled in places and things that they would like to see in the city. Unsurprisingly, their map looks very different from the spate of satellite cities and high rises that is on the official city plan.
Aside from the artworks, what else did the project create? “[The] whole process really made me realise that conversations are the most valuable part of any creative exchange,” Nelson says. “Artists getting to know each other, talking to each other about their work, their cities, their lives and everything else. The nature of these kinds of dialogues is unpredictable and the results can be very exciting in terms of creative practice.”
Phnom Penh and Bangkok may remain un-compared, but the project has certainly created exciting collaborations and artworks, as well as inviting much-needed new curatorial concepts into Phnom Penh’s galleries.
Rates of Exchange, Un-compared runs until Sunday March 8 at Sa Sa Bassac gallery, #18E2 Sothearos Blvd.
