Rubber man - CAPC musée d`art contemporain de Bordeaux

KHVAY SAMNANG
Rubber man
As part of the programme
Satellite 8 Enter the Stream at the Turn
EXHIBITION
09.17 —11.15.2015
ground floor
OPENING
Saturday, September 19, 2015 — 11 am/18 pm
PRESS KIT
CONTACT PRESS
Pedro Jiménez Morrás
Head of Communication & Press
CAPC musée d’art contemporain
T. +33 (0)5 56 00 81 70 (l.directe)
Cell. +33 (0)6 71 12 79 48
[email protected]
PRESS RELEASE
ENTER THE STREAM AT THE TURN
(RALLIER LE FLOT)
Enter the Stream at the Turn is a command
disguised as a gentle metaphor. Borrowed from a
longstanding Khmer proverb, it suggests one should
adapt to the mainstream as a cultural code for
social and political harmony. In non-democratic
contexts where such a proverb remains ever
relevant, where freedom of expression is politically
restricted, artists often enact this proverb as a
strategy of resistance.
Satellite Programme 8 invites four artists – Khvay
Samnang (Cambodia), Nguyen Trinh Thi (Vietnam),
Arin Rungjang (Thailand), and Vandy Rattana
(Cambodia) – whose channels of resistance involve
the moving image realised both within and against
a complex inheritance of cultural and historical
occupation and censorship. Mainstream headlines,
contentious current affairs, and official histories are
approached as reference points for reexamination
through intimate, personal narrative. In the artist’s
contexts, to tell the small story, to record memory,
to quietly mine and reconstruct archives, to simply
make unauthorized images, is to strategically
disquiet official history. To disquiet official history
is to challenge the inherited and living authority
that perpetuates it.
The resulting images and narratives reach us in
code, in layers, overlapping past and present,
reality and fiction, fiction and documentary. In
avoiding dichotomous views, a space for ambiguity
is offered to agitate dominant apprehensions of the
subjects approached. Further, the featured artists’
practices act to reformulate the position of the
artist as distinct from citizen and nation; their goal
is not to make clear, to prove or disprove, but to
offer a register built on inquiry that leads to
unknowing.
Erin Gleeson, Independante curator
KHVAY SAMNANG
RUBBER MAN
Following on from Khvay samnang’s
previous works such as Untitled (2011),
and Where is my land? (with Nget Rady)
(2014), Rubber man (2015) confronts a
contested landscape with poetic
resistance.
For over one year, Khvay Samnang
repeatedly returned to Ratanikiri,
cambodIa’s northeastern highland
province, to survey the altered
environment—from the remaining villages
to the strategic clearings, from rubber tree
saplings to mature plantations.
His three-channel video installation frames
these landscapes, in which the artist pours
fresh liquid rubber over his body, then sets
about walking in and out of the rational
cash crop lines, as if a lost specter.
As the forests disappear, Khvay Samnang
asks, where will the spirits live?
Subtly and often with humour, Khvay Samnang
offers new interpretations of history, current
controversial issues and longstanding cultural
practices.
Khvay Samnang (born 1982, Svay Rieng,
Cambodia) has a multidisciplinary practice spanning
performance, photography, video and installation.
Prompted by instinct and hearsay, direct experience
and media sources, Khvay Samnang follows
unresolved stories he believes require intervention.
Employing symbolic and intentionally futile
gestures, he offers new interpretations of history
and contentious current affairs events that resist
the polarizing language known to media and legal
reports.
For Khvay’s Satellite 8 commission Rubber Man
(2015), the artist responds to the specific colonial
legacy of land use. French Indochina privatized the
Khmer monarchy’s land 131 years ago, in 1884.
Soon after, rubber seeds arrived, imported from
Brazil. And soon after that, the French imported an
economic equation that began the physical,
conceptual and spiritual transformation of
Cambodia’s nature into exploitable land.
Cambodia’s first land concession was established
in 1922 for a rubber plantation, which, until 1975,
was the largest in the world.
“I am inspired to make something when I
learn about an imbalance between people’s
stories, news sources and the experience
at the site of the problem.”
“I want the body, movement and images
to offer new ways to think about the
power that threatens the land and the
people’s lives.”
Khvay Samnang
Rubber Man, 2015
The Khmer language transliterates the French
transliteration, caoutchouc, of an indigenous South
American word for rubber. Referred to as the
“crying tree,” its latex tears drop after the tapping
incision. Perhaps the most biting reference for the
word rubber is as it applies to today’s
intensification of the colonial concession project in
Cambodia’s indigenous forests and culture:
scraping away, erasing.
There are more than 20 different highland
indigenous groups in Cambodia who have distinctly
different cultures, languages and histories from
those of the lowland Khmer population. Resident
forest and ancestor spirits play a critical and
omnipresent role in everyday life, which follows an
elaborate subsistence cycle of planting,
transplanting, harvesting, and regeneration.
Threatened by multiple colonialisms, many
communities in this area have been able to resist
the effects of state formations that have developed
over the last century in Cambodia. And their
spiritual beliefs have effectively ensured forest and
wildlife conservation. however, land concessions
and agribusiness that favor the economic powers
of today – from individuals to governments to
multinationals – seem the strongest threat to their
time immemorial culture.
“The body is both my material and my
strategy.”
“It becomes clear to me what to do when
something outside of myself shows me
the way.”
Khvay Samnang
Rubber Man, 2015
BIOGRAPHIES
Erin Gleeson
Independent Curator
Erin Gleeson is the co-founder and artistic director
of SA SA BASSAC in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. SA
SA BASSAC is a gallery, resource center, and
reading room that aims to facilitate, produce,
archive, and exchange on projects around
contemporary art at a national and international
level.
Amongst Erin Gleeson’s recent projects are:
"Roundtables: The Body, The Lens, The
City" (2014), a one day symposium about
performance art and its documentation in Cambodia
organised by SA SA BASSAC; "FIELDS: An
Itinerant Inquiry Across the Kingdom of
Cambodia" (2013), a one month traveling researchoriented residency programme with twenty
participants from eight countries; a group exhibition
and catalogue entitled "Phnom Penh: Rescue
Archaeology" (2013) at ifa (Berlin and Stuttgart);
an exhibition "Sights and Sounds: Global Film and
Video" at the Jewish Museum in New York (2013);
and "If The World Changed", the 4th Singapore
Biennale (2013-2014).
Erin Gleeson has been the Cambodian desk editor
for Art Asia Pacific magazine since 2005, also
writing for other publications such as her recent
collaboration with South as a State of Mind. She
has given talks and workshops with various
partners including: Young Curators Workshop, 8th
Berlin Biennale; Tokyo Wonder Site, Japan; the 6th
Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art at the
Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane (Australia); the
Asia Art Archive, Hong Kong and New York; Para/
Site Art Space, Hong Kong; Sotheby’s Institute,
Singapore; and the Museum of Modern Art, New
York. In 2014, she was the keynote speaker at
Auckland University’s Curatorial Symposium (New
Zealand) on the theme of cultural exchanges and
indigenous culture. As well as her nomination for
the Independent Vision award from Independent
Curators International (2012), she was awarded a
travel grant by the Foundation for Arts Initiatives,
as well as one for young researchers from the
Center for Contemporary Art at the Nanyang
Technical University, Singapore (2014). She
nominates for numerous residencies and prizes,
most recently the Vera List Center Prize for Art and
Politics and AIMA AGO Photography Prize.
Erin Gleeson was born in Minneapolis. She worked
in the education department at the Minneapolis
Institute of Arts and Walker Art Center Sculpture
Garden and Art Lab before moving to Cambodia in
2002 on a Humphrey-Fulbright Fellowship awarded
by the University of Minnesota Law School Human
Rights Center.
Khvay Samnang
(born 1982, Svay Rieng; lives and works in Phnom
Penh) has a multidisciplinary practice between
photography, video, performance, and installation.
He approaches news sources and everyday life,
attuned to unresolved stories that he believes
require intervention, even if only symbolic. With
subtlety and often humor, Khvay offers new
interpretations of history, contentious current
affairs and longstanding cultural practices. His
recent exhibitions in 2014 include the IV Asian Art
Biennale, Taiwan, IV Singapore Biennale, and IV
Moscow International Biennale for Young Art.
Khvay is a Prudential Eye Awards Finalist for Best
Emerging Artist Using Photography in Asia (2015).
He is a resident at Bethenian Kunstlerhaus, Berlin
(2014-2015).
2010
- Creators Program, Tokyo Wonder Site, Tokyo,
Japan
-Co-founder, Sa Sa Art Projects, The Building,
Phnom Penh, Cambodia
2009
- Co-founder, Sa Sa Art Gallery, Phnom Penh,
Cambodia
2008
- Bassac Studio, Phnom Penh, Cambodia
2007
- Photography: history and Training with Stephane
Janin, Popil Photo Gallery, Phnom Penh, Cambodia
- Co-founder of the artist collective Stiev Selapak
SOLO EXHIBITIONS
NOMINATIONS
2015
- Prix Pictet, France
- AIGA AGO Photography Prize, Canada
- Prudential Eye Awards, Best Emerging Artist in
Asia Using Photography
- Sovereign Asian Art Prize Finalist, hong Kong
2014
- Sovereign Asian Art Prize, hong Kong
- Future Generation Art Prize, Ukraine
2013
- Future Generation Art Prize, Ukraine
- Prix Pictet, France
RESIDENCIES
2015
- Bethenian Kunstlerhaus, Berlin, Germany
2013
- Residency Unlimited, NYC, USA
2011
- Creators Program, Tokyo Wonder Site, Tokyo,
Japan
- Between, Metahouse, Phnom Penh, Cambodia
- Co-founder, SA SA BASSAC, Phnom Penh,
Cambodia
2015
Tomio Koyama Gallery, Tokyo, Japan
Programmation Satellite 8, Jeu de Paume, Paris and
CAPC, Bordeaux, France
2014
"human Nature", Tomio Koyama Gallery, Singapore
"Rubber Man", SA SA BASSAC, Phnom Penh,
Cambodia
"Staging Cambodia: Video, Memory and Rock-nRoll", hAU, Berlin, Germany
2012
"Newspaper Man", SA SA BASSAC, Phnom Penh,
Cambodia
2011
"human Nature", Royal University of Fine Art,
Phnom Penh / PhotoPhomPenh, Cambodia
"Untitled", SA SA BASSAC, Phnom Penh,
Cambodia
"Wedding + hair", hôtel de la Paix Arts Lounge,
Siem Reap, Cambodia
2010
"Wedding", Sa Sa Art Gallery, Phnom Penh,
Cambodia
2009
"hair", Java Café and Gallery, Phnom Penh,
Cambodia
SOLO EXHIBITIONS
2015
8th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art
(APT), Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, Australia
2nd Afriperforma Biennale, Lagos, Nigeria
"Eagles Fly, Sheeps Flock", Art Stage Singapore,
Singapore
"Prudential Eye Awards Finalist
Exhibition », Art Science Museum, Singapore
"Social Engagement Artists", Tomio Koyama,
Singapore
"The Khmer Rouge and the consequences.
Documentation as artistic memory work",
Akademie der Künste, Berlin, Germany
2014
"Swimming in Sand; Growing Rice Under an
Umbrella, No Vacancy", Melbourne, National
Gallery of Victoria’s Ian Potter Centre and
Federation Square Melbourne, Australia
"Medicine to heal: Cambodian Photography since
2000", Xishuangbanna Foto Festival, Yunnan,
China
The 7th Moving on Asia: Censorship, Alternative
Space LOOP, Seoul, South Korea
2013
"Everyday Life", 4th Asian Art Biennale, Taipei Fine
Art Museum, Taipei, Taiwan "If The World
Changed, 4th Singapore Biennale, Singapore
"Sights and Sounds: Global Video Art", The Jewish
Museum, New York
"Phnom Penh: Rescue Archaeology", ifa, Berlin and
Stuttgart, Berlin
"Out of Nowhere: Photography in Cambodia",
creativetimereports.org "Developments", Seventh
Gallery, Melbourne, Australia
2012
"Poetic Politic", Kadist Foundation, San Francisco,
USA
"Deep Sea", Primo Marella Gallery, Milan, Italy
"Mondi", DryPhoto Contemporaneo, Prato, Italy
"Terra Incognita", Noorderlight Photography
Festival, The Netherlands
"Current Views and Actions: Photography and
Performance Documentation from Phnom Penh",
NIU Art Museum, DeKalb, USA
"Between Fantasy and Reality", Contact
Photography Festival at The East Gallery, Toronto,
Canada
"Ruptures and Revival: Cambodian Photography in
the Last Decade", ICAS, Singapore
2011
Tokyo 2010, Tokyo Wonder Site hongo, Japan
"Arles Photography Festival Night of the Year",
Arles, France
2010
"Luxury Time and Space", Tokyo Wonder Site
Aoyama, Japan
"Orange International Photography Festival",
Changsa, China
2009
"Forever Until Now: Contemporary Art from
Cambodia", 10 Chancery Lane Gallery, hong Kong
2008
"Nuit de l'Année - Rencontres d'Arles", Arles,
France
VISUALS FOR PRESS
The copyright-free reproduction and display of the
following selection of images is authorised solely
as part of the promotion of this exhibition at the
CAPC musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux and
only while the exhibition is in progress.
La reproduction et la représentation des images
de la sélection ci-après est autorisée et exonérée
de droits dans le cadre de la seule promotion de
l’exposition au CAPC musée d’art contemporain
Jeu de Paume et pendant la durée de celle-ci.
All images are:
Khvay Samnang
Rubber Man, 2015
Installation with 3 single-channel HD videos, 3 channel
sound, 4 min 04 sec each Co-production: Jeu de Paume,
Paris; Fondation Nationale des Arts Graphiques and
Plastiques and CAPC musée d'art contemporain de
Bordeaux
Courtesy of the artist
© Khvay Samnang, 2015
All images are:
Khvay Samnang
Rubber Man, 2015
Installation with 3 single-channel HD videos, 3 channel
sound, 4 min 04 sec each Co-production: Jeu de Paume,
Paris; Fondation Nationale des Arts Graphiques and
Plastiques and CAPC musée d'art contemporain de
Bordeaux
Courtesy of the artist
© Khvay Samnang, 2015
PACTICAL INFORMATION
EXHIBITIONS
GINTARAS DIDŽIAPETRIS
Album
09.17.2015 — 01.24.2016
KHVAY SAMNANG
Rubber man
09.17 — 11.15.2015
HORS TEXTE
A selection of artists’ books from
the library collection of the
CAPC musée
09.17.2015 — 01.24.2016
Opening
Saturday, September 19, 2015
11 am — 18 pm
ALEJANDRO JODOROWSKY
Until 10.31.2015
L’ÉTERNEL DANS L’INSTANT
Andrée Putman at the CAPC
Until 01.10.2016
ALEXANDER APÓSTOL
Yamaikaleter
Until 09.27.2015
PRESS CONTACTS
CAPC musée d’art contemporain
Pedro Jiménez Morrás
Head of Communication & Press
T. +33 (0)5 56 00 81 70 (l.directe)
Cell. + 33 (0)6 71 12 79 48
[email protected]
Claudine Colin Communication
Dereen O’Sullivan
T. + 33 (0)1 42 72 60 01
[email protected]
CAPC
musée d’art contemporain
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[email protected]
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MUSEUM PATRONS
Honorary patron
Château Haut-Bailly
Founding patron
Amis du CAPC
Leading patrons
Fondation Daniel & Nina Carasso,
Air France
Patrons
SUEZ environnement,
Château Chasse-Spleen, SLTE,
Fondation d’entreprise Hermès,
Lacoste Traiteur, Château
Haut Selve, Lafarge Granulats,
Le Petit Commerce, Hôtel La Cour
Carrée
The Exhibition Khvay Samnang:
Rubber man, is a part of “ Enter the
Stream at the Turn “, curated by
Erin Gleeson for the Satellite
Programme.
This exhibition is co-produced by
the Jeu de Paume, Paris, the
Fondation Nationale des Arts
Graphiques et Plastiques and the
CAPC musée d’art contemporain de
Bordeaux.
The Friends of the CAPC contribute
to the production of the artworks in
this programme.
capc-bordeaux.fr