ដែនដីរង្គឺ | Shaking Land
Bearing shared interests in changing landscapes, especially the impacts and implications of human intervention on our environments, Shaking Land and Water brings together the works of six artists from Cambodia and Singapore. The exhibition’s title takes its cue from the work of participating artist Sao Sreymao, with the motion of “shaking” as evocative of movement, instability, change, as well as a means to unsettle perceptions and assumptions. These sentiments undergird all the artworks in the show that traverse land, watery and littoral zones to examine and navigate the tenuous dynamics between human, nature and urban development.
Centred around dialogue and conversation, each artist in the exhibition had a conversation partner—Eng with Toramae, Prak and Syahrul, Sao with Zarina—to share experiences, insights and explore issues that resonate across their practices. The artworks presented in the exhibition were developed through this exploration in artistic exchange.
This exhibition is co-curated with Sa Sa Art Projects, an artist-run space embracing diverse, experimental and critical contemporary art practices. Founded in 2010, the activities of the Phnom Penh-based initiative endeavours to address Cambodia’s lack of infrastructure for contemporary art engagement and education.
Sao Sreymao and Zarina Muhammad’s statement
Shaking Land + Breathing in Unbreathable Circumstances is a mixed media installation by Sao Sreymao and Zarina Muhammad that draws from and is built from conversations between the two artists across the span of several months. Through sharing and exchanging site-specific images, songs, and stories on watery pathways and riverine arteries, disappearing communities, grief, and displacement, the work engages with the politics of inhabitation by human, non-human, and all sentient beings in between. The work is presented as a visual conversation that unfolds through questions on breathing, surviving, shaking, moving, and taking (up) space in times where interdependencies between human activity and natural systems appear tenuous. The work draws from both artists’ long-term research on relational entanglements and the meeting of different forms of knowing, understanding, respecting, and being present with the ecological, the more than human and non-human.
Sao Sreymao artwork statements
“Shaking Land” is the collective memories of landscape changes resulting from development that begins from small streams to Tonle Sap, from the countryside where I grew up to the city center.
Through the compilation of photos and personal documents from the area where I have gone and been nearby, I witnessed the loss of landscape form, scenic views, and cultural life because of evacuation. For instance, in October 2018, residents who lived on the water in a part of Tonle Sap lake in Kampong Chhnang evacuated to land with their floating homes. Houses that relied on jars placed upside down to keep them floating now rely on small pillars, ropes, and rails to support their weight.
Contradictorily, people who live on land use these jars as water storage. Using jars upside down to keep houses floating has been the practice for generations of those who live on the water. When relocated to land, they are like jars that sit still in the sun and are left to break and leak over time. They could not do as much as when they lived on the water. They lived far away from the fishing area, their house structure was not for land, and some fell into debt due to poverty. Some people even decided to leave their homes for factory jobs in the city.
Changes along the streams where I grew up make me clearly see the loss of traditions and customs, not to mention heritage buildings, traditional houses, and trees that aged over a hundred years.
Buildings, lakes, streams, and trees are great history tellers. Therefore, I am interested in speaking about land refilling and the destruction of heritage buildings.
Shaking Land
The series Exhibition were supported by Collaboration between SASA Arts Space Project and Esplanade Jendela (Visual Arts Space)
The story origin of the series were part of long term art research project partially funded by the Luce Foundations’ Mekong Culture WELL project at Michigan State University.”
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