Category: Art

30 art collective

You could be forgiven for being taken aback by the buffalo in the lobby of Sofitel. The life-sized beast, made entirely of rice straw, is one of 100 pieces showcased at Galerie des Arts, an eclectic exhibition held in collaboration with ReCreation art agency. The sculpture was given life by Cambodian artist Nou Sary. Both the title – Nourriture (‘food’) – and the medium are connected to the sculptor’s memories of starvation under the Khmer Rouge: a central topic for Sary, who uses art as a way to process the pain of his past.
Thirty other artists, local and international, contributed to the collection, which includes everything from painting and sculpture to pottery and jewellery, from knives and sabres to fashions crafted from recyclable materials. “Cambodian artists now are more open and confident than before,” says Madeleine de Langalerie, curating the exhibition until it closes on May 31. “They don’t copy any more and they are developing their own ideas and language. We wanted to create a diverse group to show how much they can do.”

Among the many works dotted around the hotel is a silver-plated gecko designed by Soth Simarck. Its body is made of intertwining leaves, generating a rich and elegant pattern. This protector of households evokes the vital bond between man and nature, something which should be safeguarded. Nature is a central element also for Som Rany, a jeweller who appreciates the simple beauty of organic materials, particularly seeds. These are hand-collected and rubbed with coconut and lemongrass oil, which leaves their natural splendour shining. “These two artists, together with fashion designer Oeun, have their own social business,” says Langalerie. “They are three lovely and determined ladies who started their own trade providing an income to people in need, particularly women.”

Galerie des Arts is a dialogue between different forms of art, as well as different generations. On one side there are the ‘fathers’ who survived Pol Pot and still bear the scars, like Sary, Lim Theam and Sera. On the other, a rising wave of young artists bringing fresh proposals with energy and a touch of romanticism. This is the case with Joint Destiny, by Thang Sothea. “My two artworks, which share the same title, are more powerful when they are together,” says the artist. “One is a painting depicting the symbolical juxtaposition of two fingerprints and the other one is a sculpture representing the union of two lovers.

WHO: 100 artists, local and international
WHAT: Galerie des Arts exhibition
WHERE: Sofitel, #26 Old August Site, Sothearos Blvd.
WHEN: Until May 31
WHY: “Creativity takes courage. ” – Henri Matisse

 

 

Get your freak on

I’ve just met Mit Jai Inn and am sitting in a bar next to the river trying to digest the rich and curious contents this equal parts peculiar and wise artist from Chang Mai is transmitting. Mit is someone who can be truly inspiring if you pay attention to what’s behind his artwork.

Words are stones, and describing his art – which is more about vibrations, movement and in-between sensations – can prove challenging. Curator Erin Gleeson knows this all too well: his artworks cannot be labelled ‘paintings’ or ‘sculptures’. You simply have to see them, in all their glorious dancing shapes.

But let’s try to get inside Mit’s world, a utopia crafted from bright colours, juxtaposition of endless layers of oil, positivity, spirituality, freakiness and freedom. “His studio is a positive place where there is no suffering, a place where the actual painting is meditation,” says Gleeson, overseeing his exhibition Postpositive: Freaky You Are Always at Sa Sa Bassac until May 11.

Meditation has been part of Mit’s daily routine since he was 15. It’s a practice that’s “all about how to be free… free from problems; from our brains; from information; free from tomorrow,” says the artist. “While painting, I get rid of the negativity of life to be in a state of positivity and balance.”

With my feet bare and eyes tightly closed, I try to follow the artist’s instructions: “Forget about time, just be here now.” The rational Western side of me initially resists, but then I begin to be aware of my whole body as one entity and that’s precisely the way to approach Mit’s work. “See not only with your eyes, but with your whole body,” he encourages.

Despite Mit’s thick, tactile brush strokes and the remarkable weight of his work, his creations have an inner lightness, the levitating essence of poesy and spirituality; the movement of a dance, sometimes strong and vivid like rock ‘n’ roll and other times soft like the silent flap of a butterfly’s wings. “My utopia is here in these layers of light, dancing and vibrating on my canvas.”

Mit is a playful and poetic intellectual, but must not be mistaken for an artist who lives in an artificial bubble made purely of colours and light. As cofounder of Chang Mai Social Installation, Thailand’s first public art programme based on the exchange of disciplines and debates, he’s a man with a deep socio-political conscience. “In Thailand, the propaganda and the suppression operated by the monarchy is very strong, even now. In the ‘90s, some people of my young generation used to meet at the so-called midnight university. We met at night to talk about important issues; it was a form of resistance.”

WHO: Mit Jai Inn
WHAT: Postpositive: Freaky You Are Always art exhibition
WHERE: Sa Sa Bassac Gallery, #18 (second floor) Sothearos Blvd.
WHEN: Until May 11
WHY: “The purest and most thoughtful minds are those which love colour the most” – John Ruskin

 

The streets are alive

What do jasmine flowers, a vampire movie, current affairs and a blindfold have in common? They are all tools belonging to Belle Sodhachivy Chumvan, Cambodian choreographer and dancer of international repute. She is one of the protagonists of La Rue Danse, organised by the French Institute: an outdoor dance spectacle that, on March 8, will burst into life on Koh Pich.

Twenty choreographers and dancers will perform to different kinds of music: expect everything from classical to hip hop to circus to rock. Visitors can roam between eight outdoor stages for a night in full motion. “There will be a general movement all around the garden, creating a very dynamic and fresh ambient,” says Olivier Planchon, deputy director of the Institute.

Belle, who will perform her own choreography, says inspiration can come at any moment. “Contemporary dance is very connected to our daily life,” Belle says. “I can be inspired by news, by a passer-by or by a detail of a movie. For example, I remember taking inspiration from the smoothed movement of an axe, manipulated by a character before killing a vampire.”

A graduate of the Royal University of Fine Arts, Belle’s beginnings were in classical dance but her creations represent several styles wrapped up in a very personal and innovative way. “It’s a continuous research and experimentation,” she says. “Usually, my performances are based on two themes: one is connected to Cambodian contemporary background and the other is about my personal feelings.”

The choreographer, who will also perform at the prestigious Opera de Paris next spring, is swift to point out that in order to be a good dancer you have to be also an actress, getting into the part and communicating feelings. Belle’s mother, who is her greatest fan but also her harshest critic, taught her something she would never forget. “At the beginning, I thought that dance was all about movement and technique but she is the one who told me: ‘Belle, if you dance only with your body you look like a puppet. You need to have feelings which guide your movements. Everything starts from here…’” Belle says, motioning to her heart.

And while concentration may be the most important thing to achieve before stepping on stage, Belle says she never performs without her special propitiatory ritual. “As dancers, we usually buy three different kinds of fruit, jasmines and candles as offerings before a show. When we perform we can feel the protective presence of the spirit on top of us. I know that there is no better master than us to feel confident on stage, but it’s good to have an extra assurance.”

Indeed it is. After all, dance is a very physical art form – and can, on occasion, prove dangerous. Pointing to a scar on her lip, the result of a performance in which she was blindfolded, Belle laughs, recalling having to return to the stage with a black eye: “I remember my boss saying: ‘Oh god, she looks like a boxing dancer!”

WHO: Belle Sodhachivy Chumvan et al
WHAT: La Rue Danse performance
WHERE: Koh Pich (Diamond Island)
WHEN: 7pm March 8
WHY: “Dance, when you’re broken open. Dance, if you’ve torn the bandage off. Dance in the middle of the fighting. Dance in your blood. Dance when you’re perfectly free” – Rumi

 

Body & Lens

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

 

Hunter of emotions

Her face is furrowed by crossroads of deep wrinkles; she chews tobacco, has an impenetrable expression and sports a krama atop her head. Who is she? Cambodia – or perhaps what the country might look like if it had a face.

Sometimes our mood can be interpreted through our facial expressions: an open smile, a scream of terror or anguish, a laugh, a nose wrinkled in disgust, tearful eyes. Other times, almost imperceptible facial movements are like mysterious shadows, forming and vanishing in the blink of an eye. Such fluid feelings can be difficult to decode, with only the most attentive of eyes able to capture them on canvas. This is the job of Sao Sovannara: hunter of human emotions.

His portraits comprise photography imbued with secrecy. One, depicting an elderly woman representing the Kingdom of Cambodia, became the manifesto of Cambodian Portraits, a new exhibition at The Insider Gallery. The collection includes 15 profound and intimate artworks, including paintings and sculptures.

“When I started this artwork I thought about my granny,” says Sao. “She used to always have tobacco in her mouth and wear a krama to wrap her hair up. These are very typical Cambodian traditions. She died recently but her memory is always very strong.” The young artist, who used to draw in night markets to finance his art and architectural studies, is one of the winners of the second Cambodian Fine Arts Contest, celebrated last year at the Royal University of Fine Arts. His subject, says Sao, is a woman who, like many other grandmothers, endured great hardship to keep her family alive, but despite everything still wears a smile. She is, above all, symbolic of Cambodia’s endurance and strong will.

There’s a certain feeling captured inside any portrait: it takes time to create one and even longer to interpret the person behind the easel, waiting for something more than a photograph, deeper than a mirror. Art, psychology, sensitivity and concentration are the main tools for someone like Sao. “Being able to reproduce wrinkles, the signs left by a life of contrasting emotions, has been the hardest thing for me,” he says, pointing out how art can remind people of something long lost. “My generation is very different from the previous ones. We should listen more to our ancestors, study more about the history of Cambodia and, above all, not throw our traditions away. We should never forget where we come from because this is our strength.”

WHO: Sao Sovannara
WHAT: Cambodian Portraits art exhibition
WHERE: The Insider Gallery, Intercontinental Hotel, Mao Tse Tung Blvd.
WHEN: Until March 10
WHY: “We should never forget where we come from because this is our strength.” – Sao Sovannara

 

Remembers a friend

“The truest friends are those who help each other in happiness and health and who don’t abandon each other in times of great suffering. Friends deserve glorious memory and riches without wanting to be famous. If one knows something, then that one wants to share it with the other, never looking for reasons to be jealous, never speaking badly of the friend. When one sees the friend has done wrong, the other counsels them, never lets them take the wrong road. Friends never say one thing and mean another, never lie to or receive each other, pointing out the way to earn achievement and success is through honesty. Such a good friend is hard to find.” – Svay Ken,

He was the Raffles handyman turned grandfather of contemporary Cambodian art; she was a doctor of art history from Columbia University with a penchant for soft cotton trousers and dark shirts “with spots like gecko eggs”. Between them, the late Svay Ken and Ingrid Muan formed a close if uncanny companionship, one that would lift the self-taught painter onto the international stage and radically alter the way the world viewed Cambodian creativity. Svay Ken, whose ‘studio’ was for years little more than a small easel erected in the shadow of Wat Phnom, was the first artist in this country to “candidly depict daily life, rather than glorify rural vistas or ancient monuments”, as Sa Sa Bassac curator Erin Gleeson noted following his death in 2008 at the age of 76 (by which time, having been born in 1933, he had painted everything from the Japanese invasion of Cambodia to atrocities committed by the Khmer Rouge). “Ken remained disinterested in mining international art history for styles or themes,” Gleeson wrote in Art Asia Pacific magazine. “Very often, journalists and curators assumed Ken had conceptual intentions behind his practice, while in fact he was simply practical. When asked by a journalist why he painted a claw-foot bathtub, he replied: ‘Yesterday I went for a walk and I saw an old bathtub thrown away in an alley.’” When his son brought news in 2005 that Ingrid had died suddenly after a doctor mistreated a dog bite, Svay Ken began to sob. “Ingrid’s death was a typical Cambodian thing: she had a minor disease, went to the wrong doctor and died two days later,” says Nico Mesterharm, of Meta House, where the exhibit A Good Friend Is Hard To Find opens this week, followed by the screening of a video interview with the artist from 2008. “Svay Ken was devastated because they really had a strong friendship and for sure she had discovered him. Over the course of a month, he painted 30 paintings – it’s like a comic book, where he describes his friendship and the moments in this friendship which meant the most to him.”

WHO: Svay Ken
WHAT: A Good Friend Is Hard To Find exhibition opening and film screening
WHERE: Meta House, #37 Sothearos Blvd.
WHEN: 6pm February 11
WHY: He’s right about good friends

 

Playing with dragon fire

It sounds surreal but there are two people in Cambodia who speak dragon. They came all the way from Germany to do this and they are Ernst Altmann, an artist from Berlin, and his filmmaker wife Bjela Proßowsky. It all started in their kitchen, which is probably where all the best ideas originate: the idea of going back to Southeast Asia, the land which stole Bjela’s heart when she was a young traveller, to create a comparative artistic project with Cambodians. And so How To Talk To Dragons was born.

With the help of fire-breathing winged things, shadow puppets and a video camera, the artists set out to discover similarities between the Old Continent and Asia – and uncovered a few peculiarities along the way. A test performance of their shadow play JMOM takes place at Meta House on February 8, followed by a bigger event in March involving musicians and other performers. “Ours is a growing exhibition,” Bjela explains. “We want to bring our show around local villages and get people to create and play with us. The work-in-progress itself is the project, which I am filming in all its fascinating process.”

Ernst and Bjela are now combing Phnom Penh, hunting for oil lamps, local tailors to make a special tent, ancient Cambodian myths and examples of the dragon tradition in folk art. At public shadow puppet plays, they have been thrilled by the enthusiasm of Cambodian children, who play with the silhouettes on Ernst’s t-shirt. “Shadows are magic,” says Ernst. “Videos and films are fast and they suck you in, but the time frame of this art is slow. While playing and cutting them, I go back to childhood, losing myself in the moment. Through this project we want to gain back time and encourage people to go slow again.”

The couple chose dragons as their theme because the creatures exist in every culture, connecting the whole of humankind. Moreover, legend has it that the lands of the Khmer originated from the Naga, a water dragon, something Cambodia’s sense of identity is still strongly connected to. While some youngsters scoff, dismissing winged fire-breathers as the stuff of childish fantasy, Ernst noticed they exhibit a certain shyness towards – almost a fear of – these fantastical beings, especially when talking about Neak Ta, a guardian spirit. Somehow, even under the surface, Cambodians still identify with it.

“The dragon is the symbol of power of nature,” says Ernst. “It’s the human connection to his natural state. Europeans killed this bond, but in Cambodia it’s different. It’s a moment to say: ‘Hey, don’t forget that this is your power. It’s great that you have it. Don’t lose it.’” In an era that is increasingly becoming a crazy rush against everything – time, nature, ourselves – perhaps we should pause for a moment and pay heed to our ancestors. We might even rediscover how to speak dragon.

 

WHO: Artist Ernst Altmann and filmmaker Bjela Proßowsky

WHAT: How To Talk To Dragons exhibition and JMOM shadow play performance

WHERE: Meta House, #37 Sothearos Blvd.

WHEN: 7pm February 8

WHY: “I believe in everything until it’s disproved. So I believe in fairies, the myths, dragons. It all exists, even if it’s in your mind. Who’s to say that dreams and nightmares aren’t as real as the here and now?” – John Lennon

 

We built this city

Marxist philisopher Henri Lefebvre famously coined the term ‘the right to the city’. Far more than individual liberties to access urban resources, this is a common right to change ourselves through reshaping the processes of urbanisation. Organised by Java Arts, this year’s Our City Festival – founded on the very same precept – brings together a cast of 200, with more than 45 projects and 19 ‘cultural partners’ showcasing the very best of the country’s artistic and architectural talent across Phnom Penh, Battambang and – for the first time – Siem Reap.
…..

Artistic twists on how not fall off your moto; sunset poetry readings on the essence of transience, and an interactive song-and-dance parade featuring cyclos cocooned in coloured string. Dance, sculpture, music, film, literature, painting, photography, performance art: creativity surrounds you, absorbs you, draws you into a world that is familiar yet unfamiliar all at once. Disciplines merge; surprises come in the form of ingenuity, innovation and reinvention. Rotting mansions serve as plinths. Art spills right out of gallery windows and onto the very streets. For almost a month, between January 17 and February 9, the country’s three main urban hubs will come alive with interactive art installations; architectural play spaces; urban flash mobs; spoken word on street corners and myriad hands-on workshops for one and all. The focus: ‘space and its relationship to the individual’.

Jorng Jan (‘Remembering The Past’), an exhibition opening at the Bophana Centre in Phnom Penh on January 25, recreates decades-old stories inspired by family heirlooms to draw attention to how memory and identity play out over multiple generations. Four Cambodian artists – photographers Neak Sophal and Kim Hach, filmmaker Neang Kavich and multidisciplinary artist Kong Vollak – unite in a single space. Here, the artists explore their chosen heirlooms, along with the complex relationships they developed during the creative process with the families each item belongs to.

Creative producer Pip Kelly, from Australia, has been documenting the Jorng Jan project. “It’s all about looking at the good things, the things that people want to remember, document and collect,” she says. “In the future, people who have seen this exhibition will remember their own moments, too. An underlying thread of this project is everyday life: not just focusing on the Khmer Rouge, but before and after; going into the daily lives of what people were doing, like on the weekends or at school or after work or through their relationships.”

On The Streets, hosted here by OCF founder Dana Langlois’ Java Arts Café & Gallery, is a powerful performance uniting six artists from around the world: Cambodian-American Amy Lee Sanford, Ashley Billingsley and Margaret Honda from the US, Kong Vollak (Cambodia), French-Viennese Rainer Prohaska and Saigon-based Sandrine Llouquet. Curator Chương‐Đài Võ has identified street vendor culture on an international level as a powerful topic capable of describing themes of migration, displacement and determination.

“Throughout Southeast Asia, as countries enter and associate with organisations like the World Bank and IMF, influence leads to government decisions that promote gentrification,” he says. “Vendors are seen as people who occupy valuable real estate. A lot of the street vendors are no longer allowed to operate in their downtown areas. Just as street vendors need to be very resourceful, I wanted to reflect that resourcefulness through collaborative action: pair artists up who have never worked together and pair those who have never worked before in a place or know a local culture with those who have: the non-Southeast Asian artists will be paired with Southeast Asian artists.”

Each artist has the opportunity to collaborate, but must also create an individual project based on their respective home culture. In the case of Amy Lee Sanford, Phnom Penh has been home since 2009. Her piece, purely a work of sound, reflects the life of street vendors and at markets throughout the city. “I chose to record things that I hear a lot and also things that people hear a lot but don’t really notice,” she says. “There are a lot of different sounds here… I’m trying to call attention to everyday sounds people don’t necessarily register but they hear.”

Amy’s work focuses on the transfer of ideas and experiences from one person to another. “Sharing work in a different way will be interesting for people here,” she says. “The piece is bringing attention to what people often miss and the attention of sound and how sound affects our own being. It’s a perspective I’m offering, like my pieces in general. There are thoughts and reflections.”

One of the most out-of-the-way elements of the celebrations in the capital must surely be the nightly mini-festival of cinema at Chanthy’s Café at the White Building, featuring film and media works produced by Aziza Film School, Sa Sa Art Projects and the people who call this crumbling landmark ‘home’ (you’ll find Chanthy’s Café on the ground floor, between the third and fourth stairways).

On January 31, attention turns to the festival’s satellite cities: Siem Reap and Battambang. In the former, the human cost of ‘construction displacement’ is explored on canvas by Vincent Broustet and George Whelan; Olivia Bradley’s multimedia performance, Relation, investigates how humans perceive light. Several artists in Siem Reap turned to tourism and the close proximity of Angkor Wat as inspiration. Head West to Battambang, where Mao Soviet is curating, and let local artist Phin Sophorn take you on a ‘tuk-tuk art tour’, or experience the devastating effects of flooding on the city’s crumbling heritage buildings in a performance art installation by Nov Sokunthea.

The overarching vision for the festival, integral to presentation and programming, starts with the curator. This year, that role goes to Sovan Philong, winner of the Samaritaine Young Photographer Prize in Paris last year and originally from Kandal province. For Philong, collaboration is key: “We’re doing the festival for the public, for the people,” he says. “We are all looking at the same ideas, even if they are in different categories. The idea is to support the festival together. We want to tell the people here: ‘If this is your city, we have something we want you to see. We have something we want to show you. It’s kind of a different thing.’ Even if we don’t see 100,000 people, if we only have one person that really wants to see the festival, that’s fine… We would like them to discover what we’re doing, what we want to show and what we have for Cambodian people, including those who are not artists.”

Among this year’s volunteers – a core part of the festival’s sprawling crew – is Hang Sokunthea, who first became involved last year. For her, the festival is an opportunity to breathe new life into an urban culture in danger of falling into neglect. “There are just so many things and places that people have chosen to ignore, to forbid or to allow to be forgotten,” she says. “What I look forward to is empowering people to put love in the city, improve and make the city a better place to live.”

Hor Daro, a 22-year-old architecture student interested in social problems facing urban Cambodia, is one of 28 ‘youth ambassadors’ selected from six universities and trained by Sokunthea to support the festival. “Young people are those who can change our society to be better,” he says of his involvement in the scheme. “Being members of the programme, young people will be inspired to be active and creative to make new things which are very useful to our society.”

WHO: Artists & architects
WHAT: Our City Festival 2014
WHEN: January 17 – February 9
WHERE: Phnom Penh, Battambang and Siem Reap (details at ourcityfestival.org)
WHY: This city is what we make it

…..

FRI 17:

6:30pm @ The Mansion, Street 178 & Sothearos Blvd:
Ingolv Haaland, a Norwegian composer completing a PhD on music in Southeast Asia, composed the festival’s theme song. Called Siem Reap in honour of his former home, it’s played on the Cambodian tro and Haaland is due to release a new album in April together with Khmer singer Ouch Savy, with whom he performs live tonight. Pandaemonium Dance, meanwhile, is a project spearheaded by choreographer Gillian Rhodes which explores cross-cultural human connections. By contrasting traditional and contemporary dance styles, the performance investigates ‘instability in rapid-fire urbanism and the struggle to maintain identity in modernity’.

SAT 18:

10am @ The Mansion, Street 178 & Sothearos Blvd:
Cambodia Knits workshop: How To Knit, In Five Minutes Or Less.

3pm @ The Mansion, Street 178 & Sothearos Blvd:
Tour of the exhibition with curator Sovan Philong and festival artists.

4pm @ The Mansion, Street 178 & Sothearos Blvd:
Moto Moto, a performance created by Epic Encounters and choreographer Becky Devitt, uses physical theatre to educate on how best not to die in a moto accident.

5:30‐8:30pm @ The White Building rooftop, Street 294 & Sothearos Blvd:
Bonn Phum Nov Bo‐ding (‘Village Festival at the White Building’), a series of cross‐platform goings on put together with the help of The Building’s long-term residents, opens with a sunset performance on the roof of this iconic landmark designed by the doyen of Cambodian architecture, Vann Molyvann. Cloaked in poverty, drugs, sex work and petty crime, The Building in fact houses vast artistic and creative knowledge. Here, this ‘mini-city’ is transformed into a towering, collaborative museum. Look out also for the many pop-up micro-exhibits.

8:30pm @ The Mansion, Street 178 & Sothearos Blvd:
Cambojam is one of the longest-running international-style music outfits in Cambodia, particularly in their home base of Siem Reap. Eight musicians, carrying Asian passports from Cambodia to Japan and European passports from Russia to the Netherlands, play acoustic/electric/eclectic, covering jazz; folk; pop; reggae; funk, rock and hard rock.

SUN 19:

10am @ The Mansion, Street 178 & Sothearos Blvd:

Moto Moto, a performance created by Epic Encounters and choreographer Becky Devitt, uses physical theatre to educate on how best not to die in a moto accident.

11am @ The Mansion, Street 178 & Sothearos Blvd:
Exhibition talk with curator Sovan Philong and festival artists.

2pm @ The Mansion, Street 178 & Sothearos Blvd:
Cambodia Knits workshop: How To Knit, In Five Minutes Or Less.

4:30pm @ Cambodian Living Arts, #128 Sothearos Blvd
CLA musicians and Tiny Toones dancers set off from CLA’s headquarters to perform a flash mob at The Mansion at 5:30pm, bringing together classical and contemporary music and dance forms, on ‘yarn-stormed’ cyclos covered in coloured string by Cambodia Knits and the Cyclo Association.

5:30pm @ The Mansion, Street 178 & Sothearos Blvd:
Poetry at sunset, featuring classical and contemporary interpretations of ‘performative poetry’ with both master and emerging poets.

TUE 21:

6pm @Meta House, #37 Sothearos Blvd:
Celebrating one of Cambodia’s late, great masters is the Svay Ken: Phnom Penh Painter exhibition, of which the OCF literature says: ‘From the beginning, Svay Ken set out to record the daily life around him and avoided the grand landscapes of temples and idealised pastoral life that swell Cambodian galleries. The undistorted paintings in this exhibit of friends and family, of survival under the Khmer Rouge, of illness, and of ordinary street life, display the seeming simplicity of style and sophisticated mastery of craft which are the brilliance of Svay Ken’s work. With characteristic humbleness, Svay Ken once said: “My paintings are like a camera of my life of sixty years.” That his work also gives dignity and history to the commonplace lives of the resilient fellow citizens he so much admired is also his genius.’

THU 23:

6:30pm @ Institut français du Cambodge, #218 Street 184:
Body As Site is the result of a workshop by Cambodian-American performance artist Anida Yoeu Ali, with visual arts students from the Royal University of Fine Arts. The five-day intensive asked the question: How can the body be presented as both content and context? Students examined the global history and context of contemporary performance art with a special focus on its emergence in Southeast Asia. FRI 24:

FRI 24:

2pm @ Mith Samlanh, #215 Street 13 (next to Friends restaurant):
In Engineers vs Kids, Advancing Engineering Consultants work with local children to reinvent the city by, among other things, designing and testing small structures made from toothpicks and imagined cities built out of Lego. Join in. And let your kids join in, too.

SAT 25:

8:30am @ Meta House, #37 Sothearos Blvd:
Tour sustainable architecture projects across the city by bus, courtesy of Komitu Architects.

9am @ Sa Sa Art Projects, Street 294 & Sothearos Blvd (second floor, between fourth and fifth stairways):
Artist Nguyen Thi Thanh Mai opens her studio to display art in the making.

3pm @ Bophana Audiovisual Resource Centre, #64 Street 200:
Jorng Jam brings together artists and members of the local community to ‘reclaim, reinvent and remember their family photographs and stories from Cambodia’s vibrant past’. Using film, photography and mixed media, five young Cambodian artists set out to uncover the intimate stories and historical photographs of people living in Phnom Penh during the ‘Golden Era’ of the 1950s and ’60s.

6pm @ Java Café, Sihanouk Blvd:
On The Streets is inspired by Southeast Asia, ‘where sidewalks and plazas are an essential meeting ground for commerce and social interactions’. Six artists examine the effects of globalisation through the prism of ‘vendor cultures’ from Boston, Los Angeles, Phnom Penh, Saigon and Vienna, together producing ‘collaborative actions to respond to the imperatives of mobility and displacement in a Southeast Asian locality’.

8:30pm @ The Mansion, Street 178 & Sothearos Blvd:
live music from various artists.

SUN 26:

5pm @ corner of Street 178 & Sothearos Blvd:
Greg Bem, Soknea Nhim and other assorted poets host an outdoor poetry reading and, afterwards, you – yes, YOU – are invited to respond in kind.

7:30pm @ The Mansion, Street 178 & Sothearos Blvd:
Preh Chan Chos (‘Moon Down’) is an improvised performance by the Cambodia-based collective Common Sole, featuring Eric Ellul and ‘combining creative energy from the fields of performance and education’.

 

 

 

The lost art of album covers

They call it the Golden Era, the halcyon days before the Khmer Rouge smashed the country. Norodom Sihanouk was king, arts and filmmaking flourished and the upper middles rocked to an acid-washed hybrid of traditional Khmer music and 1960s Western rock ‘n’ roll.

The pop stars of the era – Sinn Sisamouth, Ros Sereysothea, Phan Ron, Huy Meas – often played live at the National Radio station, their music beamed across the airwaves and blasted into the street with bullhorns like a modern-day wedding party.

Pol Pot silenced them all. And by the time he was finished, the music, the players and the history had all but vanished.

Hollywood cameraman John Pirozzi first discovered Cambodia’s lost rock ‘n’ roll while working on Matt Dillon’s film, City Of Ghosts. Over the last decade, the native New Yorker has interviewed more than 70 survivors: former musicians, friends, family, fans. He has amassed nearly 150 hours of video and collected more than 200 record covers, 50 of which comprise the exhibition Don’t Think I’ve Forgotten: Every Album Cover Tells a Story, on display at the White Rose Art Gallery until January 10.

Few full-length LPs were produced at the time. The covers, each scanned from the original and digitally retouched, were created for 7-inch vinyl. They came from around the planet, one or two here, a couple more there. The designs are as diverse as the music inside them. Stylistically the cover art exemplifies the quirky, ’60s-era designs that modern-day retro tries to imitate. Portraits are most often black and white, but the graphics around them are rich with primary colours. Names and titles are occasionally translated into French, the style of music printed below in questionable English – calypse, blue, jerk.

The exhibition is a prelude to the screening of Pirozzi’s heavily anticipated documentary film Don’t Think I’ve Forgotten: Cambodia’s Lost Rock ‘n’ Roll, premiering Saturday at Chaktomuk Theatre, a ’60s-era building designed by Vann Molyvann.

The screening will be followed by live music: musicians from the film will play live and Chhom Nimol, lead singer of Dengue Fever, is scheduled to perform four songs. The screening is invitation only, but the theatre holds 600 and there are lots of tickets around, Pirozzi says.

WHO: John Pirozzi
WHAT: Don’t Think I’ve Forgotten: Every Album Cover Tells a Story art exhibition
WHERE: Kolab Sar Hotel, #436 Street 310
WHEN: Until January 10
WHY: Album art from the Golden Era

 

Exploring inner space

When artist Khiang Hei performed Space Within at the Bophana Centre on December 19, almost 50 people found themselves tied up in his experimental, mostly improvised installation. Greg Bem reports on the ensuing twists and turns.

It’s the end of the performance. Borey, a friend, collects metres and metres of the pink, yellow, orange, purple, blue and green ribbon and slowly approaches me, wielding it en masse. He wears a grin like a scythe ready to cut me open. The main performers have already taken their bows and are filtering into the audience for necessary post-event socialising. And so the cameras refocus on Borey and me, waiting to see what will happen. Everything is dragging, slow motion, etiquette and style and purpose, and then Borey acts: with great effort, he wraps me in a cocoon of filthy ribbon fouled by water and dirt. In an act of retaliation, I reposition half of the chromatic snare around Borey’s torso, thus ensuring we’ll both look like fools or geniuses in unison. The chaos of ribbon, soaked by water, is slick and disgusting, rubbing liquid against our skin, ruining our clothes. I look off in the distance and notice Khiang Hei’s nod of approval.

I’ve known Khiang Hei for a couple of months, having first been introduced on a late-night rooftop above Street 63’s Boulevard of Broken Dreams. Khiang used to live in Manhattan and I remember his loud NYC expressions driving my original attraction to him. Across the room I listened to his conversations on Washington Heights and an American urban landscape I’ve come to love and hate and know over the past five years: racial divides, geographical decay, gritty artist struggles. This realm of chatter was quite the typical exchange for a party of cheap booze, homely Singaporean cooking and constant blood extractions from ankle-frenzied mosquitos. White meat.

A few coffee meetings and an established friendship later, I wound up at Bophana Centre. Aside from a handful of photograph prints and a variety of explicit sculptures in his apartment, I hadn’t encountered Khiang’s art before and certainly didn’t know much about what he planned for Space Within. While we did toss ideas for this event around at a restaurant on Pasteur a few times, I was still in the dark. New updates were made to the Facebook event nearly every day. A video from October 2012 surfaced and I watched Cambodian dancers (and Khiang himself) spontaneously throwing objects and each other around the central space on the ground floor at Bophana. I was reminded of Merce Cunningham.

And now it’s 2013. The audience, made up of around 50 expats and Cambodians, sits in chairs pointing toward the central space of Bophana’s ground floor. Khiang is circling the room, passing out wafer-like cookies and what he calls “worms”, a Chinese New Year treat made of flour and coconut milk. They look like worms and they are delicious, almost melting inside your mouth. After his first circuit he makes a second round, distributing unused coils of pink, yellow, orange, purple, blue and green ribbon to each person in the space.

The performance, if it hasn’t already begun, is definitely in full swing now that the audience has been equipped. There is beautiful, hesitant Ouk Channita half-dancing across the room: there is exploration, grace and intelligence. There is Ali Ben with some manner of hand drum easily bringing up a beat and then discarding it at a moment’s notice. Trumpeter Steffen slowly blasts out notes and garbles of sound, just loud enough to keep the audience alert without damaging or distracting.

I’m fumbling with my camera and then look up to see Khiang standing right in front of me. “Start it off,” he says, and then motions for me to use my ribbon. I do, as Borey, sitting next to me, would do, and as everyone in the audience will soon do as well: I tie my blue ribbon to Khiang’s and slowly unwind the coil as he proceeds to move away, onward.

The rainbow of ribbon, a madness of string, goes from strands to waves cascading behind an enraged Khiang. There is purer and purer motion, energy, force, breakage. The audience stares sitting, gaping, googly-eyed as he moves around the room, lines get crossed and tangled and the installed material becomes one beautiful, impeding mess. Previously open and passable, the space becomes more and more impassable with each step Khiang takes. The musicians struggle to stand in security along the periphery of the centrum. Khiang’s bound            appendages and torso create a constraint on the movement in and out of the room’s centre. What is the Space Within? What is apparent the moment the audience realises their contribution to the performance isn’t just a beautiful form of ribbon, but a locking down of a sentient being?

Khiang is so overwhelmed by ribbon he is unable to move. He becomes the puppet, with the entire audience a puppeteer collective. Ribbon is to be pulled by everyone. I yank on my ribbon and watch Khiang try to yank back, yank back on mine, but grab hold of bundles of ribbon belonging to groups of ten other hands from within the crowd. There is ribbon in the corners. There is ribbon under feet. There is a large basin of water in the centre of the room and ribbon dangles into it, slides through it, causing the room to become slippery. Khiang tries to control his movement, but gets caught by the currents of power from many wrists. The people of the room, from the audience to the other performers and even including some of the photographers, want to pull Khiang toward them.

In an ejaculatory fury, Khiang manages to rip free from his bonds and exhaust himself in the ‘space without’. Members of the audience laugh. Or look disturbed. Or confused. Or all of the above. The focus of the audience gently transitions to other performers, who engage subtly with the now deadened material lingering like litter throughout the space. The energy dims. Several women are invited into the crowd to dance. I am motioned by one of the performers to join in the dance, a conga line sans torso clutch, and everything is slightly more absurd, the giant water container in the room’s centre, dead ribbon scattered everywhere. Prematurely, the performance is called to an end. It feels too soon, but then I notice Borey. He’s walking toward me and the mass of ribbon he has collected is firmly between his hands…