Past

Sights and Sounds: Cambodia

Nov. 8, 2013 – Jan. 30, 2014

Sights and Sounds: Cambodia features new work by Than Sok, Khvay Samnang, Svay Sareth, and Studio Revolt + Khmer Arts, selected by Erin Gleeson.

The moving image was one of the most popular art forms during Cambodia’s culturally rich Independence years (mid-1950s – early 1970s). Combining available modern technologies with inventive do-it-yourself techniques, full-length feature films rich in magic realism often explored folkloric and mythical themes, starring humans, spirits, and serpents in love triangles and cycles of creation and destruction. These forays were interrupted during the Khmer Rouge regime (1975–79), when an estimated 90 percent of artists and intellectuals were executed, leaving traditions and developing practices to stagnate for decades. Film and video have only recently become strands in the practice of today’s artists. Since 2007 some twenty works have been made by local and diasporic Cambodians.

This selection for Sights and Sounds is a representative sampling of common approaches to video art thus far in Cambodia. Mon Boulet is a document of a public performance centered on catharsis. Untitled, also a performance, but one made explicitly for the camera, symbolically confronts the conditions surrounding today’s aggressive land grabs and forced evictions. The meditative Negligence Leads to Loss; Attention Preserves and the fantastical Neang Neak expose contemporary tensions between spiritual customs and modernization.

Erin Gleeson
Curator

Erin Gleeson is Artistic Director of SA SA BASSAC, Phnom Penh, a nonprofit gallery, reading room, and resource center cofounded in 2011 by Gleeson and the Stiev Selapak artist collective. She divides her time between Phnom Penh and Berlin.

About Sights and Sounds: Global Film and Video

This long-term series offers a rotating selection of vigorous film and video works by contemporary artists from around the world — with a particular emphasis on work being made outside western Europe and the United States.

Sights and Sounds: Global Film and Video is a long-term presentation of new film and video works made in the sphere of the visual arts. The series offers a rotating selection of vigorous works by contemporary artists from around the world. It introduces New York audiences to the latest developments in filmmaking within the art context and underlines the Jewish Museum’s holistic and global approach to the understanding and presentation of art and culture.

Sights and Sounds takes advantage of the straightforward way film and video travel: shipped on discs or streamed online, these works provide an instant connection to new creative practices from even the most remote locations.

Twenty-five international curators have selected new film and video work from their respective regions of the world—ranging from Argentina to Vietnam, Nigeria to Romania, New Zealand to China, and many places in between. Their picks are screened for one month each in the museum’s media center, which has been turned into a miniature cinema for the occasion.

The works in Sights and Sounds touch on themes significant to both Jewish culture and universal human experience: spirituality, exile, language, conflict, family, humor, history. The series creates a broad network of artistic expression and curatorial perspectives that takes stock of what is happening in film and video art at this moment in time across the globe—with a particular emphasis on work being made outside western Europe and the United States.

Sights and Sounds will culminate with a selection of highlights from the series. One work from each country will be presented in the gallery from February 5, 2016 to June 30, 2016.

Jens Hoffmann
Deputy Director
Exhibitions and Public Programs

#sightsandsounds

Installation view of Sights and Sounds: Global Film and Video in the Goodkind Media Center. Photo by David Heald.

Exhibition highlights

Than Sok, still from Negligence Leads to Loss; Attention Preserves, 2009, video, sound, 9 min., 42 sec. Artwork © Than Sok