Art with no name

Khvay Samnang used to sell his paintings at the market for $15 apiece. Now, favouring the camera lens over the paintbrush, he’s forging a reputation in the international art world – although his focus remains firmly at home.

Untitled, a series of photographs of the artist standing in a downpour of sand half-submerged in lakes, evinces Khvay’s humanitarian and environmental concerns. Untitled uses an invented language of gesture to predicate the impending event of development on land where immense lakes now sit. We are mostly aware of these development plans, but Khvay’s exposition of the anticipated change inspires the sort of reaction no news report can.

A news report is a commentary, which Khvay is determined Untitled is not. Untitled is a parody – a serious parody – which exists prior to the event. It’s a cipher: encrypting the event in a language of gesture, while decrypting it by rendering the event in simple terms, all without the help (or hindrance) of the written or spoken word.

Oddly, the seriousness of the consequences of such development is only accessible in this form. Khay’s is an intimate parody, which seems to say ‘This is too much,’ rather than asserting how it is. It bespeaks the unnarratable, but the language of gesture is understandable. It functions to illuminate the condition and it is beautiful in its simplicity.

This month, Khvay will show a documentary film which accompanies Untitled in the group show New Artefacts at Sa Sa Bassac Gallery. This film has never been shown before because, up until now, Khvay hasn’t found an appropriate platform for it.

“When I exhibited Untitled in 2011, I included one video with the photographs. I wanted to have more video, but I felt the documentary video was fighting with the photographs. The documentary is the opposite from the photographs. I would have liked to show them all together but the contrast made me decide to show together with only the video of the dropping sand, not a documentary video. When Roger (Nelson, curator) talked with me about the idea for New Artefacts, I feel like ‘Oh my God, I have the video!’”

Khvay’s urge to record his process bespeaks a natural drive to document. It’s a form of savouring the temporary: that which is threatened, which is the landscape itself, but also the instantaneous nature of the photograph, without context. He seems to establish another base on which his vision can stand.

The documentary reveals a new ‘truth’: the truth of Khvay’s creative experience. “In the video you can see the local people keeping busy working but still looking. I didn’t ask them what they think about my work because I think maybe the security is coming, so I needed to hurry up.” The video highlights the individuality of the locals, some of whom feature in the photographs, but appear as potential subjects of the images’ aesthetic.

Another conflict between photograph and video occurs on the site of Khvay’s body. The photographs evince Chinese contemporary arts pioneer Wang Jianwei’s notion that “the artist as an individual participates in the process and eliminates his personal power so as to eliminate all desire for self-expression” as a completed process by the time the photograph is taken.

The video demonstrates the process of that elimination. Khvay wading into the water is an experience which centres more on the individual’s struggle towards achieving his vision, eliciting moments of disgust and compassion. It is as though during the walk towards the point at which Khvay will be photographed, he is shedding his self-expression, his corporeal skin, to become the gesturing figure, the symbol of the drowned.

WHO: Khvay Samnang
WHAT: Untitled documentary and photography exhibition
WHERE: Sa Sa Bassac Gallery, #18 2nd Floor, Sothearos Blvd.
WHEN: August
WHY: An intimate parody of development

 

In the name of love

She describes herself as a ‘one-woman worldwide wreckin’ machine’, was instrumental in the launch of MTV Base Africa, and is the only female ever to be nominated for a MOBO (Music of Black Origin) award. DJ Sarah Love, spinning at Pontoon later this month, was christened the UK’s First Lady of Hip Hop for a reason – and she’s on a zealous mission to bring the genre to some of the most remote corners of the Earth. The Advisor caught up with her between rock climbing expeditions in Thailand to talk DNA, spinning the wheels of steel with Grandmaster Flash, and the ongoing battle to keep hip hop culture alive and kickin’ it.

You describe yourself as a ‘genetic musician’.

Yeah, my mum’s South African and my dad is British. They’re both jazz musicians , and my mum’s an African musician too, so quite a mixture of sounds. My dad’s really into bebop: his main instrument is double bass, but he also plays trumpet and piano, and my mother’s a singer.

Why did you opt for electronic music?

I’ve been interested in music since a very young age. I’ve played piano, drums. Music’s always been there, and my parents’ record collection was always there. They were very much into soulful music, funk, dope party-rockin’ kinda tunes. My older sisters introduced me to hip hop. I had this nerdy fascination with music. I didn’t just want to be on the sidelines, I wanted to be involved. I wanted to find out how those sounds were made, to know what was going on. My own curiosity pushed me into investigating hip hop. What is this DJ thing? What are they doing? How is that happening? I had a boyfriend who was also a DJ, and I asked him to show me some things on the turn table but he refused. I was, like, ‘Cool. Fine.’ I thought, ‘Good. I’m happy to do it myself anyway.’ My parents taught me to be very independent. I watched DJs I thought were really good, and tried to memorise what they were doing. I’d go home and practice, see if I could recreate what I’d seen. It’s a ‘monkey see, monkey do’ sort of thing. Making mistakes is a great learning curve.

And you’re a graduate of one of the UK’s finest music schools.

I went to one of the pioneering schools for popular music, Salford University in Manchester, and did a popular music and recording degree. Salford was the first place in the UK that did a non-traditional, popular music recording and production-style degree.

You’ve worked with some of the greats, including Grandmaster Flash, who was here a few months ago.

He’s a real grand master in the game, a bona fide legend. It’s only a privilege and an honour to be able to rub shoulders with someone as accomplished as that, really, isn’t it? And DJ Muggs from Cypress Hill, he was just a laid-back, cool Cali cat with a cool Cali vibe. Chilled dude. But it’s always interesting to encounter all sorts of creative types at different levels in their careers and see how they handle that.

How has hip hop changed since you first took to the decks?

In the UK, there’s lots of electronic music that people are rapping on top of, but I differentiate between that and hip hop, which has a long history – three decades plus, almost as long as hip hop has been around in America. It’s a dedicated crowd. We’re all musical connoisseurs. That’s why hip hoppers are able to spin off and create other movements. Anything that’s dope has to come through the UK at some point. It’s like a melting pot for all the freshest stuff in the world. London is always a place to keep your eyes on, whether it’s live music, electronic, or hip hop. We’re always going to have hip hop aficionados to keep the bloodline going.

We’re a bit of a melting pot here too, with returnees from France and the US. Hip hop has a huge following. 

It’s fascinating to touchdown in any part of the world and be playing hip hop. It’s incredible to spend 12 hours on a plane and people know the music, and there’s a history of hip hop there. To encounter b boys, and graffiti, it’s just crazy. I feel it’s my responsibility to fly the flag for hip hop responsibly and correctly, to spread the word and keep our culture vibrant and alive.

There are so many DJs who’ve been around longer than me, but have sold out because they don’t feel confident. I just want to do what I feel passionate about. It’s not all about just chasing cheques. I want to do something that has meaning to me, so it’s an honour for me to be able to reach somewhere like Phnom Penh and spin for you guys, bring hip hop correct to the people.

With the launch of MTV Base Africa, you seem to be growing into an ambassadorial role.

I’d been an MTV DJ so when they asked me to be an ambassador for the launch, I came through to Nairobi in Kenya and had a phenomenal time. It was dope to be in the motherland, you know, and doing my thing there. Then I went through to DJ in Tanzania, and they have a dope, dope hip hop history there. I did a show with Fid Q, in Dar Es Salaam – a big outdoor party with 3,000 kids there and they’re all rapping the lyrics to his song; just beautiful. These are the messages and stories that I want to spread when I go back home, because people think we’re facing all these challenges in hip hop. A lot of people in the States are quite disheartened with hip hop, hence they become sell-outs. They need to know. You know what? There’s stuff going off in Tanzania; there’s stuff going off in Cambodia. There are things going off in Australia. Hip hop around the world is bigger than your back garden.

So it stands for something?  

Most definitely, hip hop has a very strong meaning and this is the message that needs to be clearer. There’s hip hop, and there’s rap. Rap music is songs that just have rapping on them; hip hop music is a whole culture, nearly four decades deep, that embodies dancing; it’s all about creativity, expression, community, and being funky fresh. It’s something that involves speaking in rhyme with flow and beat. It’s something also that embodies respect for heritage: you have to look at what has gone before you, do your research, and then cultivate that and bring it all together in something new. Hip hop is a culture that’s all about the people. It was originally for disenfranchised people who had no other outlet, a way of channelling ourselves in a positive way. People who were left behind by the government: ‘Oh, right. No one’s taking care of us? Let’s take care of ourselves.’ That’s what hip hop is really about, and it’s only in recent years that it’s become this corporatised thing and certain entities see it as a way to manipulate youths to make money out of them. It’s a shame that certain people from our community have got sucked into that and are now sucking the devil’s cock.

Who should we be looking up to?

Marvin Gaye said an artist, if they’re a true artist, is only interested in one thing and that’s to move the minds of men. So for me, people like Shortcut, who I’m going to see next week; people like Shortee Blitz, Taskforce, and Rodney P of London Possee from the UK; I have so much admiration for them.

And what’s on your playlist right now?

I listen to everything: rock, soul, classical. My favourite kind of music is good music. There are only two types of music in the world: good music and bad music. I’m not someone who goes ‘I only listen to hip hop and I have no ears for anything else.’ But hip hop-wise, there’s an artist called Willie Evans Jr – he’s on a great label in the States called High Water Music, and they’re really flying the flag for great independent music. There’s an artist called Sonnyjim on Eat Good Records who is really killing it – a very dope artist from the UK. Definitely worth checking out.

Take us back to the early days of Kung Fu: what was it like being on the front line of one of London’s most legendary club nights?

I remember, every night at the time, feeling that this was something classic. I just wanted to absorb every moment of what was going on. I knew we were going to be looking back at this as something classic – and I was right. It was incredible. I was in Melbourne, Australia last month and I’d just walked into a bar and this guy was, like, ‘You’re Sarah Love! From Kung Fu! You don’t understand – the DVD from Kung Fu, how much that means to us out here! We watch it religiously!’ You had to be there every month. Every month we had a queue going round the block. You didn’t want to miss out and we always put on the best party in town. It was so exciting for me to play. I just wanted to kill it. We had the illest DJs in London playing, and it really pushed me to get my chops up because I didn’t want to look silly next to anyone else. It was an honour for me to be a resident and to see what it escalated into.

Do you ever have moments when it suddenly hits you that you’re now this huge DJ?

I’m always thinking of my next target, so I don’t reminisce too much. When you sit back and start going, ‘I’ve made it. Look how amazing I am,’ that’s when you stop challenging yourself. I’ve not reached that stage yet, and then there’s always someone bigger than you round the corner, isn’t there?

And even if there isn’t, the Gods of Smug are listening and will smite thee…        

[laughs] Exactly!

So what’s next?

I’ve spent the past 12 years pushing myself like crazy, at the expense of everything else in my life, and it’s easy to do that when you love what you’re doing. I’m trying to pay attention to other areas of my life that I’ve been neglecting, and I’ve got some interesting projects back in the UK, but I don’t like talking about things until they’re happening. I’m paranoid about jinxing things…

WHO: DJ Sarah Love (MTV Bass and BBC Radio 1Xtra)
WHAT: The UK’s first lady of hip hop
WHERE: Pontoon, St. 172
WHEN: 11pm August 17
WHY: She’s funky fresh

 

Releasing the McCracken

A key historical connection exists between Cambodia and Australia: “We are both touched or scarred by colonialism.” So says Clare McCracken, an emerging artist from Down Under whose own work is driven by the manifest damage to local communities. Scars evince past hardship while carrying its memory into the present.

There’s nothing funny about scars, but McCracken has a unique way of dealing with them: she turns to humour. Speed Check is a permanent installation in Noble Park in Victoria, and the piece’s working materials will be exhibited in New Artefacts, the first group show at Sa Sa Bassac Gallery. Passers-by have their speed of walking, running, cycling ‘checked’ by the speed camera, encouraging various antics and races between people who happen across it.

It may seem like fun and games, but McCracken is keen to point out the serious intent. “Almost all of [my public] works have been created with, and for, communities that have experienced some type of trauma. Yes, they are encouraging them to interact and react to their public space, but this is only because they are not connecting with it.” A large-scale toll road now runs through the Noble Park suburb. When it was being developed, the local council turned to McCracken for help in re-engaging people with their public spaces – and with each other.

McCracken’s public works certainly break the mundanity of the walk to work. They interrupt the everyday; sometimes making people laugh, sometimes think. Concept for a Boer War Memorial exemplifies the artist’s awareness of communal scars and her belief in the cathartic power of remembering. It is tempting to view such sombre works as distinct from the more playful installations, such as Speed Check, but McCracken is quick to rectify the mistake. “I think all my works are a type of monument.” Her art, whether drawing, installation or funny hat (she recently made a ‘sloth hat’), is meant to induce reflection on an event. More generally true of monuments (and subsequently her work), they are meant to be seen.

The same can be said for McCracken’s working materials, which she perceives as of equal importance as the end point. “I think I find the process important because it demystifies the outcome. It’s really important, to me, that my work is current and relevant. A transparent process allows people to follow your thoughts, which helps people ask you important questions about your practice, which in turn helps you to continue to think critically about your work and develop it.”

Not only is her work meant to be seen, it is meant to be understood. “People make a city great.” One could imagine her arguing that people make art great, too: she values Nelson’s desire to show only working materials because she wants people to be with her every step of the way.

Even work the artist defines as ‘private’ are public monuments: offerings to the world, even when they are not seen in parks or by road-sides. They are also invitations to take part in something. The demystifying effect of seeing working materials might be local only to McCracken’s art, but that effect is a valid one, which an audience might find particularly engaging in an exhibition which promises to be complex in its variety of artist backgrounds and media.

WHO: Clare McCracken
WHAT: New Artefacts exhibition
WHERE: Sa Sa Bassac Gallery, #18 2nd Floor, Sothearos Blvd.
WHEN: August 9
WHY: The process demystifies the outcome

 

Fonki Town

On the whitewashed walls of Phnom Penh’s French Institute, something mysterious is taking shape. A wrinkled hand emerges, a smile tilts shyly for the camera, a pair of black eyes gaze unblinkingly at the street below. Faces, a family, a stippled memory wholly personal yet, paradoxically, nationally pertinent.

The normally sedate French Institute is not the only Phnom Penh structure to be lent some graffiti cred by Fonki, a Khmer-French-Canadian street artist. One month into his fourth sojourn Fonki selected a rundown section of Russian Boulevard as the locus for his initial Phnom Penh paint-up, with full and smiling permission of the building owner. Mixing rad Montreal lettering with trad Khmer kbach aesthestics of form and colour, the piece was a hit. “For me the whole process was awesome,” enthuses Fonki. “People are curious, especially the kids. You’re there for four days and you know the whole neighbourhood.”

Knowing the whole neighbourhood can have its downsides, though; the neighbourhood watchdogs know you just as intimately. Barely a week after Russian Boulevard was given its make-over, Fonki returned to find his work inexplicably white-washed. He is surprisingly sanguine about the effacement: “The chief of police, he said ‘Yeah! Do your thing!’ So I thought it was it cool. Then after a week they buffed it! But I don’t mind, you know. Graffiti is epheremal.”

Perhaps paradoxically, Fonki is using this ephemeral and oft-maligned genre to express the inescapable truths of family, nation and identity. Both the mural adorning the Institute – the largest yet in the 22-year-old’s career – and the short-lived work on Russian Boulevard (not to mention the myriad ideas gestating in Fonki’s capacious, electrifying, high-speed brain) address ideas of permanence and contemporaneity, of past and present. This is no surprise given his family history.

As Khmer Rouge troops closed in on the beleaguered capital in 1975, Fonki’s parents fled to France and then Montreal, where the young graffiti artist was born and raised. “I’d always been drawing,” he says. “My parents never complained or showed their sadness… but I could feel some of that. I couldn’t complain or be the sad guy after everything they’d been through, so I put all my energy into street art. I realised I’d always been doing graffiti but I didn’t know it!”

While innocently making his mark as the new graffiti kid on Montreal’s urban block, Fonki immersed himself in illustration, studying animation and film at Concordia University with an old friend, Jean-Sebastien Francoeur. The twosome teamed up with Andrew Marchand-Boddy, who divides his time between winning film awards and doing flip-tricks at his local skate park, and decided to make an off-the-cuff 15 minute short about Fonki’s prodigal return to Cambodia.

Several months and 80 minutes of celluloid later, Wet Paint is a bona fide feature film in progress. It follows Fonki from Montreal to Phnom Penh, spray can in hand, giving workshops to Khmer kids and revivifying the rotting walls of Phnom’s Penh’s forgotten buildings. “This is a beautiful city,” explains Fonki, “but it’s changing so fast. That’s why I had to come now. My generation is craving… something… solidarity, identity… something.”

It’s that elusive something that Wet Paint hopes to uncover, positing freestyle art as the expressive mode of choice for the post-genocide generation. And despite Phnom Penh’s notable dearth of visual street art, Fonki feels the city is poised for a distinctively Cambodian graffiti revolution: “Our culture has so much richness of form and colour, we could do so much. In the ’80s and ’90s we couldn’t move forward, we had to try to save what had been eradicated. But now I think this generation can move forward. Now, right now, we can build an identity and be proud to be Cambodian. When you paint in Cambodia, you paint your own story, sure, but you also paint the story of your family. And the story of every other family as well, and more than that.

“But hey I don’t know, I’m just a painter,” he laughs. “For sure I’m not going to save any lives with graffiti – I’m not a doctor! But there’s one thing I always say: add colour to your present if your past seems grey. When I came here and I thought about that, I thought, yeah, everybody lost someone in the genocide. But you know something? The future is now.”

Fonki’s largest ever mural will be unveiled on July 26 at the Institut Francais du Cambodge, with live music and entertainment.

WHO: Fonki
WHAT: Street art
WHERE: Institut Francais du Cambodge, St. 184
WHEN: 6:30pm July 26
WHY: Behold the awesome power of the spray can

 

 

Repackaging the past

“I f ind it worthy to hold an emptiness, to allot for empty space, because it is often within this space that something opens up within oneself.”

Earlier this year, American-Cambodian artist Amy Lee Sanford repeatedly broke and reassembled 40 Kampong Cham clay pots as a metaphorical reworking of her endeavour to return to her family’s past and reassemble the pieces of their memories. Her performance lasted for more than six days, starting with the breakage of the first pot and ending with fixing the final shard.

 

But one cannot conceive of Full Circle as just a reflection of a personal journey. After all, Amy chose to represent that story in this way, with these pots, over this period of time. It is an aesthetic piece, in which Sanford endeavoured to “create a performance with extra physical and mental space, which can be useful for self-reflection. I find it worthy to hold an emptiness, to allot for empty space, because it is often within this space that something opens up within oneself, or something that was hidden for a while comes to the foreground”.

Creation of reflective space is an immediate effect of Full Circle, which is first and foremost an ephemeral work, based in a repeated process but being itself unrepeatable. But Full Circle does not remain entirely isolated in its unrepeatable, irreplicable being. Photographs were taken, every second, from the side and from above. Even when Amy had no audience, the cameras ‘captured’ her working. These photographs will constitute another dimension to this work of art, existing alongside but never interfering with Full Circle as a performance piece in an upcoming exhibition, New Artefacts.

Australian curator Roger Nelson foregrounds the aesthetic of process over the marketable end product in New Artefacts, to be hosted at Sa Sa Bassac Gallery in August. Sanford is one of several artists to have documentation of their artistic process exhibited. Asked to what extent she agrees with Nelson’s curatorial proposition, Sanford remarks that the concept of New Artefacts is “interesting, because the public is generally unaware of the myriad of processes that lie within the art piece presented in a gallery setting. This introduces viewers to this other dimension”.

The dynamic between the performance artwork and the photographs which document that performance creates a dialogue between the work of art as unique and original object, and the work of art as repeated, technically produced product. This debate originates with German essayist Walter Benjamin, for whom modern art had reached crisis point with the introduction of photography.

Amy Lee Sanford does not reconcile this crisis, which sees the work of art as original creation and replicable object brought into the same space. “Art is, for me, a multi-tiered process,” says Sanford. “Sometimes it is ambiguous as to when one tier ends and another begins. The photos which began as documentation of a performance are now the starting point for more artworks, with the original performance as an anchor.”

Whether the photographs function as an autonomous series or as a means of prolonging the memory of a past performance, New Artefacts shifts the paradigm of performance being documented to documented performance to instigate new ideas. Sanford’s Full Circle is to be viewed alongside other Cambodian and Australian artists’ working documents. In a new climate, through a mechanical eye, Full Circle is reworked without being invaded.

WHO: Amy Lee Sanford et al
WHAT: New Artefacts exhibition
WHEN: From August 9
WHERE: Sa Sa Bassac Gallery, #18 2nd Floor, Sothearos Blvd.
WHY: Art is like an onion

 

Hobbits!

“This has nothing to do with the Tolkien universe at all. A pre-hominid little person in Indonesia, nicknamed Flo, that’s the real hobbit. The film is based on what those people would have been like. They’re trying to tie in a little science, but then we have flying kimodo dragons, so it’s not 100%, you know, factual, obviously.”

BY PHOENIX JAY

When the frenzied spending of the roaring ‘20s dealt the US stock market a fatal blow in October 1929, Americans who’d been gilding their homes with the latest gadgets suddenly found themselves out of a job. The global crisis, initially dismissed by President Hoover as “a passing incident in our national lives”, put more than 15 million Americans – a quarter of the labour force – out of work. As disposable incomes dwindled, so did audiences at movie theatres: more than a third of the 23,000 that existed in 1930 were forced to switch off their projectors.

Those who refused were reduced to offering ever-more-unlikely appetisers to splice bums with seats. Prize draws promised everything from hams to cars; colourful vaudeville acts were staged on the sidelines. But the most effective formula by far was the ‘double feature’: two films for the price of one. The big-budget ‘A’ movie, given top billing, employed bona fide stars, quality scripts and professional production standards. The other movie, shot on a shoestring, was wildly entertaining, but made in a fraction of the time, at a fraction of the cost.

More than 75% of Hollywood films shot between the 1930s and 1950s were these so-called ‘cheapies’, which, on occasion, trounced their big-budget counterparts. John Wayne and Jack Nicholson both cut their teeth on the set of B movies, natural habitat for cult directors such as Ed Wood and his low-budget Dracula, Béla Lugosi. Perhaps most famous among their creators were the ‘Poverty Row’ production companies, who could shoot an entire film in seven days for less than $8,000.

“Most B movies are bad and forgotten,” writes Philip French in The Observer. “But at their worst they have an unpretentious, sometimes camp, charm. At their best they are as different from smooth A movies as the great pulp writers like David Goodis and Horace McCoy were from the respectable best-selling novelists of the day… One of the greatest cinematographers, Robert Alton, who won an Oscar for An American in Paris, preferred to work on low-budget movies shot on tight schedules because of the challenge they presented.”

Such knowledge is not lost on Anthony Fankhauser, the producer of Hollywood B movies Snakes on a Train, and Mega Shark versus Giant Octopus, among other tongue-firmly-in-cheek titles. He has spent the past two weeks crammed into a small cave in the wilds of Kampot, alongside hobbits, prehistoric Java men, the odd giant, and at least one large ‘flying’ kimodo dragon made of papier-mâché.

“There are only so many movies that can be made at studio level, but there’s an insatiable desire for new content – and that’s not just in America, it’s everywhere. If you go to Cannes Film Festival, for example, what runs concurrently with that is the Cannes Film Market and they sell all kinds of movies. If you walk through there, you’ll see your Batmans, all your big studio movies, and then, on the second floor, they have booths and booths of movies very much like this. There’s a big market for what I guess you could call second-tier content. And people enjoy them.”

Fankhauser, clad in shorts, plaid shirt and flat cap, is speaking on a set devoid of all the usual Hollywood trappings, eating rice while squeezed into a plastic picnic chair (his job title is conspicuously absent from the back). “Of course, I’m a fan. At the time, they probably weren’t considered B movies, but for me it was the Roy Harryhausen movies: Clash of the Titans, Jason and the Argonauts, stuff like that. I was fascinated by monsters and other creatures from a very young age.”

On another table under the far side of this vast canopy sits a small army of little people dressed in mock animal skins. Among them the notably taller ‘Java men’, sporting glued-on uni-brows that sprout from their foreheads like tarantula legs. One has a lethal-looking spiked wooden club dangling from one hand, a cigarette jabbing at his lips from the other. Bending over to hook a Coke out of the cooler reveals a flash of fake designer boxers. He grins at the camera, lips parting to reveal fake buck teeth.

These unlikely dwellers of 21st century rural Cambodia are, along with one or two rather more recognised names such as The Crow star Bai Ling and Christopher Judge (Teal’c in TV’s Stargate SG-1), the hastily assembled cast of The Age of the Hobbits. The film is timed to beat its mainstream rival – director Sir Peter Jackson’s Hobbit trilogy, inspired by the work of celebrated author JRR Tolkien – to screens before the year’s end. While Jackson’s prequel to the Lord of the Rings blockbuster has a budget of $500 million, The Age of the Hobbits’ is $500,000, most of which will be spent on post-production, or the sort of special effects that make kimodo dragons take flight. Filming took just 15 days.

This gloriously camp straight-to-TV ‘mockbuster’ is set 12,000 years ago in Indonesia, where the remains of one of mankind’s possible predecessors – rudely snuffed out since by the cruel processes of evolution – was identified in 2003. Barely a metre tall and even smaller of brain, Homo floresiensis was immediately christened ‘the Hobbit’ by a Tolkien-crazed media. One scientist even suggested naming the species Homo hobbitus.

In Hollywood, initial film pitches have to be 25 words or less (the pitch for Alien was, famously, even more to-the-point, reading simply: ‘Jaws in space’). “The idea behind this film,” says Fankhauser, “is just… hobbits. And there’s an immediate recognition of that word. This has nothing to do with the Tolkien universe at all. A pre-hominid little person in Indonesia, nicknamed Flo, that’s the real hobbit. The film is based on what those people would have been like. They’re trying to tie in a little science, but then we have flying kimodo dragons, so it’s not 100%, you know, factual, obviously.”

The script is hardly Oscar-winning material: “It’s a pretty clear-cut story. The hobbits’ village is raided by Java men, who also existed in Indonesia at the same time. They steal a bunch of their people and they’re going to sacrifice them to the moon goddess. Lots of people get picked off along the way. Yes, we have some impalement, but the piranhas got changed to giant spiders.”

Suggest the plot sounds reminiscent of real-life tensions between the Javanese and the Balinese and the producer laughs. “Doesn’t it, though? I’m sure the writer was aware of that. If you go back to old school science fiction – The Twilight Zone, The Outer Limits – there always seemed to be a moral to the story. A lot of that’s been lost in recent B movies. Now it’s more just shock and awe, try to pack in as many visual effects as you can. But any writer who heard me say that would slap me in the face because they all try – I know they do, because some get busted for it – they all try to put subtexts and morals in the script, which you have to, otherwise why write the movie? I think Scorsese called it ‘idea smuggling’.”

Joe Lawson, directing this Tolkien knock-off, made his debut with The Institute LLC – the international arm of Hollywood studio The Asylum – earlier this year with the splendidly named Nazis at the Centre of the Earth. “What happens with a B film is that, hopefully, you walk in knowing that it’s not going to be the best thing in the universe, but it might be monumentally entertaining,” he says from beneath the brim of his legionnaire’s hat, perched on a rock in the searing afternoon sun. Behind us, Cambodian hobbits and Javans – some trained comedians and stage actors, others hired on spec – are smoking, giggling and poking each other with their clubs between takes. The role of King Korm, head of the humans, went to Phnom Penh-based beat poet and actor Antonis Greco after being turned down by John Rhys-Davies, the charismatic Arab excavator Sallah in the Indiana Jones films.

“And that’s the thing: the ride is going to be worth the time taken. It’s an hour and a half when you don’t have to think, and you don’t have to spend a lot of money for it. Our movies are about popping the popcorn in the oven, opening a beer; you can even sit back and make fun of it – so long as you’re having fun making fun of it. There are things we do in our films that are outrageous, absolutely outrageous – like Nazis at the Centre of the Earth. The title itself is already way out there. The company that we’re part of is definitely not shy about making films that are fun. And the people who are working on these films, if they’re not having fun, they’re learning something – even if that something is ‘I never want to work on a film like this again.’”

WHO: Hobbit fetishists
WHAT: Age of the Hobbits
WHERE: TV
WHEN: December-ish
WHY: Little people in leather

 

The Elvis presley of R&B

Godfather of Soul; Original Disco Man; Mr Dynamite: James Brown, the ‘hardest working man in show business’, inspired almost as many honorific titles as he did devotees. From first hit Please Please Please in 1956, his transformation of gospel fervour into the explosive intensity of rhythm & blues determined the destiny of soul, funk and rap.

 

A child of the Great Depression, Brown picked cotton, shined shoes and spent three years in Alto Reform School, Georgia. It was there he first met Bobby Byrd, leader of a gospel group JB later joined before being lured to the secular scene by the slamming live sound of rock ‘n’ roll legend Fats Domino. As flamboyant front-man for the James Brown Revue, Brown reportedly shed up to 7lbs a night in sweat as he whirled around stage, theatrically donning and doffing his cape and feigning the occasional heart attack. The Elvis Presley of R&B, according to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, he racked up an astonishing 114 entries on Billboard’s R&B singles chart and amassed a total of 800 songs in his repertoire.

Also like Elvis, he’s inspired a legion of tribute ensembles – among them Supabad, a Bangkok-based ménage of mostly music teachers dedicated to the “super heavy, gritty funk” sound synonymous with the ultimate Sex Machine. A big band for a big man, their horn-rich homage to a musical and cultural revolutionary cuts it with the best. “James Brown completely revolutionised the world of modern music,” says guitarist, percussionist and backing vocalist David ‘DJ Kermie’ Cameron. “We’re just starting to see that.  Michael Jackson wouldn’t exist if it wasn’t for JB. So many dance moves, beats and riffs have been lifted off JB that it’s just impossible to imagine what any kind of modern music would sound like without his influence.”

What would JB make of today’s R&B? “He’d dig the more underground stuff no one hears, such as Goodie Mob, but he’d be appalled with all the processing and artificiality of much of today’s music. James liked it loud, hard and dirty – not too neat and clean, if you know what I mean. We’re really focused on the ‘larger than life’ aspect. The sequinned suits; jump suits; hairy chest; big hair – his time in the ‘70s, when he was truly becoming the Number One Soul Brother. That seems to work best for us.”

Making his debut when Supabad perform at The FCC in August is new front-man Mike Humble (their former front-man is hanging up his wig this summer “because he’s pulled the splits a few too many times”). “Mike is a respected blues and soul singer here in Bangkok and also plays a mean blues harp,” says the band’s founder, Mark Bourgeouis. “He’s British but has a classic soul voice… and has played many gigs in a variety of bad, brightly coloured suits, so he has the wardrobe and the attitude to fill the shoes of James Brown.” Supabad will also be unveiling a new tenor sax player, Anton Fenech. “Both are part of the Famous Blues Brothers Review Band here, so they’re used to performing in character.

“Funk is definitely about ‘feel’, and as white boys we have to work a bit harder at it, but we have a great rhythm section that lays down an excellent platform for our horn section and soloists. Reproducing this act in an authentic way has been a challenge, especially the music for the horn parts. That just isn’t available on the internet or anything. It all had to be scored out from the original recordings.”

Devotees can expect a mixture of James Brown standards such as I Got You; Sex Machine, and Get on the Goodfoot, as well as some of the more obscure tracks such as My Thang, from the Hell album, and Ain’t it Funky Now from Jungle Groove. Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag from 1965 is dedicated, of course, to the purists. “Fans can expect a high-energy funk show, and they better come ready to shake it.”

WHO: Supabad
WHAT: The super heavy, gritty funk sound of James Brown
WHERE: The FCC, Sisowath Quay
WHEN: 9pm August 10 and 11
WHY: Because you’re super bad too

 

Modern-day slaves

The stories appear with depressing regularity in the press: young Cambodian women sent to Malaysia are abused by their employers. Overworked and underfed, sometimes they manage to return to their families; sometimes they die. Cambodian men escape after months or even years working in slave-like conditions on fishing boats or palm-oil plantations. Twenty-hour days, beatings, weeks with little or no pay at all are par for the course. Children are forced to beg on the streets or work as prostitutes.

Human exploitation comes in many forms, be it forced labour or sexual slavery, and is not limited to Cambodia. While it’s impossible to know the exact numbers, the United Nations estimates conservatively that there are 2.5 million victims of human trafficking around the world at any one time. The people and groups responsible for these misdeeds, the fastest growing form of transnational crime, earn tens of billions of dollars every year.

On June 20, Meta House continues its film series exploring the theme of human trafficking and exploitation with documentaries and discussions centred on this modern-day scourge. The 2011 short film Enslaved, produced by MTV, looks at exploitation in Cambodia and the region, featuring the voices of people who were searching for better lives but found a nightmare instead, as well as those who profited from their misery. Another short film, Beyond Borders, recounts the story of Cambodian Prum Vannak, who was held in virtual slavery on a Thai fishing boat, then on a palm oil plantation. His is a story of hunger, torture and crushing solitude. Once he managed to escape, only to be picked up by another broker. After three years, his torment finally ended.

Human trafficking takes place in more developed regions of the world as well. The extraordinary 2005 documentary Sex Slaves examines sex trafficking in Eastern Europe as one man tries to save his pregnant wife who has been sold to a pimp in Turkey. The film features interviews with traffickers, experts, police and women who were kept in sexual bondage. It contains undercover footage that gives viewers a glimpse into the frightening reality experienced by women trapped in this world.

In addition to the films, Ya Navuth, executive director of the anti-trafficking NGO Caram, will be on hand to talk about migration and how it can be made safer. “There is a lack of any kind of mechanism in place for people who find themselves in trouble,” he said. “Take for example the recent maid cases in Malaysia: the women should know who to turn to if things start going wrong.”

Due to the stubbornly high levels of poverty in Cambodia, the Kingdom’s population remains especially vulnerable to trafficking and exploitation, experts say. With a large percentage of people under the age of 20 and work opportunities in rural areas limited, the number of Cambodians desperate to earn a livelihood for themselves and their families and willing to migrate to unknown cities or countries to do so is huge. Too many fall prey to unscrupulous individuals. What’s even more tragic is that sometimes the traffickers are the victims’ own neighbours, friends or even family.

WHO: Cinema lovers with a conscience
WHAT: A rare glimpse into exploitation
WHERE:  Meta House, #37 Sothearos Blvd
WHEN: 7pm July 20
WHY: Understand the nature and scale of the problem

 

From the streets to the Easel

Peter sounds as though he’s been smoking 50 Marlboro cigarettes a day for centuries. Despite being barely four feet tall, he’s quick of wit and sharp of tongue, with the Gecko-like negotiating skills of a hardened stock trader more than five times his age. Standing barefoot in the scorching sand, he shifts his load of trinkets from one hip to the other: “You buy bracelet.” It isn’t so much a question as a directive.

Serendipity Beach in Sihanoukville serves as the trading floor for hundreds of Peters every year. Born into families too poor to afford electricity or running water, these children spend their days plying simple wares to tourists splayed out on the sand. When they hit the critical age of 16, their only options are low-paid manual labour, or the bar scene.

Appalled at their Hobsonian predicament, English artist Roger Dixon in 2006 offered a handful of beach kids the chance to take brush in hand and experiment with expressing themselves on paper, while dipping a toe in formal education for the very first time. Six years on, Let Us Create now has 160 budding artists on its books.

“Rather than selling souvenirs to tourists, the children spend their spare time playing, creating, learning, and interacting with their friends, our generous volunteers, and our dedicated staff,” says Development Coordinator Tavie Meier. “We are constantly working with the families to make sure they know the long-term effects of an education. The short-term money that can be made from the beach immediately affects their lives, so it’s incredibly difficult to show them the long-term view of the future.”

One such boy, Maily, has just secured a university scholarship through Adopt a Village. “A very accomplished artist”, he will be exhibiting alongside some of his classmates at the Entitlement to Freedom exhibition at Botanic Cafe this month – part of the month-long Free Your Minds Festival being hosted by Meta House. Choose from a wide range of paintings, digital prints and postcards, and watch Maily – now 17 and a model student – give a live ‘drip painting’ demonstration.

WHO: Let Us Create
WHAT: A Beach Kid’s Entitlement to Freedom art exhibition
WHERE: Botanic Café Art Gallery, #126 St. 19
WHEN: 6pm July 23
WHY: Artwork with a conscience

 

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