Anywhere But Here — Bétonsalon - Centre d'art et de recherche — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: September 14 → November 5, 2016

Curators : Mélanie Mermod & Vera Mey

Anywhere But Here (N’importe où sauf ici, គ្រប់ទីកន្លែង លើកលែងទីនេះ) brings together art­works that seek out some cir­cu­la­tions of objects, fig­ures or ges­tures in rela­tion to Cambodia, and more broadly within the geopo­lit­ical con­text of Southeast Asia. With a focus on deter­ri­to­ri­al­iza­tion — whether they would be forced or driven by free will, con­se­quences of uncon­trol­lable slip­pages or trans­fers care­fully orches­trated — these col­lected sto­ries of move­ments draw van­ishing points within pre­vailing pro­cesses of his­tory-making and pat­ri­mo­nial her­itage.

Thao‑Nguyen Phan, Untitled (Heads) from Uproot Rice, Grow Jute series, 2013 Courtesy of the artist

Numerous shifts of power in Cambodia have repeat­edly recast the con­cep­tion of cul­ture and his­to­ri­al­iza­tion of facts and pat­ri­mony, including the seem­ingly time­less and ongoing ten­sions with its neigh­bors Vietnam and Thailand, the colo­nial French Protectorate (1863-1953), the 1970 coup leading to the assump­tion of power of Lon Nol, the fol­lowing four years of civil war (1970-1974), mean­while the rise South-East Asian Communist par­ties and the geno­cidal rule of the Khmer Rouge Regime (1975-1979), to the Vietnamese ruled People’s Republic of Kampuchea (1979-1991), the rule of United Nations Transitional Authority over the country (1992-1993), which led to the auto­cratic rule of Prime Minister Hun Sen (since 1998).

Tran Minh Duc, Normal day No 2 — Some day in NY, 0

The works pre­sented in Anywhere But Here address marginal move­ments devel­op­ping within his­tor­ical moments, such as the forced exile or vol­un­tary dis­place­ments of intel­lec­tuals to France and its colonies (Hàm Nghi, Tran Minh Duc). The works of Thao-Nguyen Phan evoke the after-effects of French and Japanese intru­sions on the evo­lu­tion of agrarian land­scape and def­er­ence ges­tures, while others invent new sce­narios in pat­ri­mo­nial spaces (Shooshie Sulaiman, Pratchaya Phinthong). Some works trace the inti­mate tra­jec­to­ries of objects and anony­mous per­sons (Felix González-Torres, Khvay Samnang, Vuth Lyno), while others take as their starting point former artists’ jour­neys that lie ambigu­ously between a quest for dis­ori­en­ta­tion or a quest of tan­gible ori­gins (Albert Samreth, Singapore Art Archive Project, Vandy Rattana).

Vuth Lyno, UNTAC Project, 2016 Courtesy of the artist.