SA SA BASSAC gallery and resource centre, Phnom Penh
19 May – 19 August 2017
On Attachments and Unknowns brings together artists and lens-based artworks that offer countervisions of the methods and ideologies of statecraft in and from Southeast Asia. Resisting simplification of geography, history, identity, and art, On Attachments and Unknowns follows the affinitive strategies of artists who explore the unstable interplay between visibility and invisibility, legibility and illegibility, and knowns and unknowns – expressions critical to figuring images and writing histories, and to conceiving power and participation within political and social movements of our time. While some artworks in the exhibition blur national and regional borders with migrants’ dreams and refugee desires, others work to gender, conflate and refocus Indigenous knowledge and colonial legacies. Practices of state censorship and surveillance and ideas of the evidentiary are appropriated for close inspection. The spectacle of the political campaign and the protest are upended and personalized. Intentionally oblique and anachronistic, the artworks collectively question representability, transparency of meaning and immediacy of message, unsettling our gaze and instinct to rationalize knowing.
Artists:
Martha Atienza, Kiri Delana, Pao Houa Her, Chia-En Jao, Minstrel Kuk, Emily Phyo, Nguyen Thi Than Mai, Nguyen Trinh Thi, Sutthirat Supaparinya, Anocha Mai Suwichakornpong, Neak Sophal, Erika Tan, Yee I-Lann
Curators: Erin Gleeson with May Adadol Ingawanij and Ben Valentine