On two floors: VIDEO ART EXHIBITION - For anyone who is enamored with film or remains a devotee of performance, video art can be like a happy marriage between the two. In recent years, young Cambodian artists have discovered the medium. Please visit us tonight, to watch pieces by various Cambodian artists, in cooperation with the gallery SASA BASSAC.

* Sok Chanrado’s first video MEMORY (2012, 2:17 min) reverses footage of his childhood friend Rada who is reciting memories from the site of their former home, known as “Small Building”. The building was originally used as practice venue for traditional folk dance and music in the 1960s, before its residents were evicted during the Khmer Rouge era. Resettled by many families following the war, including those of Rado and Rada, Small Building was forcibly emptied again in 2009 during the Dey Krahom evictions.
* Svay Sareth’s MON BOULET (2011, 8.25 min) documents a 5-day durational performance in which the artist dragged a cumbersome reflective metal sphere 250 kilometers from the ancient capital of Angkor to the present capital Phnom Penh, carrying with him a few basic amenities known to refugees worldwide. The public aspect of Sisyphean futility was intended to confront conditions of the artist’s and audience’s pasts as a cathartic move into the future. In the artist’s words, “The heart is marked forever by the atrocities of the war. The mind – the seat of the body’s creative power – is a force of alchemy able to transform the difficulty, the fear, the suffering, the discouragement, into energy and creative freedom. And the body, finally, is used for resistance”.
* Prompted by hearsay, direct experience and media sources, artist Khvay Samnang follows unresolved stories he believes need intervention, even if only symbolic. Beginning in 2010, Khvay became drawn to Phnom Penh’s public lakes – vital urban hydraulic systems and vibrant residential areas that have become contested sites as the Cambodian government allows them to be filled with sand and offered for private sale.
* Khvay Samnang’s NEWSPAPER MAN (2011, 6 min) is set at the site of the most contentious former lake, Boeung Kak, after 4,000 families had been evicted and houses were buried to their rooftops in sand. A single-channel video installation and photographic series, Newspaper Man shows the artist fully wrapped by Khmer–language newspapers, walking blindly and clumsily around on the sands under the hot sun, tripping over remnants of houses as excavators move in the distance. The video reveals a cameraman as unsteady as the alien-looking artist; together, they acted quickly during security guards’ lunch break. While Newspaper Man calls attention to the land and its recent history, it critiques the role and restrictive nature of journalism in Cambodia today. In Khvay’s words, “Since the local press ignored news about the lake, I used my body to write about it.” When packing up after his performance, security caught sight and inquired. Khvay responded, “I told them that I was there to sell newspapers. They replied ‘But there are no people here!’, to which I replied: ‘Exactly, business people always think ahead. You are developing this lake, and I am here first!’”

* Under the title LOOKING AT THE BIG SKY, 14 videos by students from Germany's best art schools were chosen by a jury including media artists and professors Mischa Kuball and Corinna Schnitt to show current young positions in video art. Artists were given inspiration to cross borders, to give free rein to ideas and illusions and think outside the box. The results offer an astonishing variety of motifs and practices. Some tell fictional stories, individual assertions and performances are shown, while others present pseudo-documentary formats. Reaching for the sky in so many different ways, the videos sometimes aim at an individual internal view which finds meaning in the seemingly insignificant and unspectacular, and other times seek to formulate an outlook on the immeasurable and indeterminate. The project is presented by the Goethe-Institute. It includes works by Fabian Driehorst and Frédéric Schuld
Hohenpeissenberg, Stefan Ewald
Birkensee, Hannah Hummel, Bianca Kennedy, Alwin Lay, Henning Frederik Malz, Kevin Pawel Matweew, Anna-Lena Meisenberg, Lucie Mercadal, Jens Pecho, Julia Charlotte Richter, Marko Schiefelbein,
Anna Sokolova
and Maximilian Wagner.