Artist talk: Enzo Camacho and Amy Lien

Thursday 4 February 2016, 6pm
In English with Khmer translation

Enzo Camacho and Amy Lien are artists who work collaboratively in multiple locations, overlapping diverse research methodologies with experimental and conceptual play. Their practice often explores contemporary questions and experiences that point to complex and layered connections: including between places, times, people, and social worlds.

“The call centers mushrooming all over the sprawling urban fabric of Metro Manila have unleashed a dazzling chain of analogies,” the artists suggest; and “distortion makes the facts more titillating.”

In this artists’ talk, Camacho and Lien will present “Leak Light Time Heat,” a project that was developed in Manila and exhibited in a solo exhibition at 47 Canal gallery in New York City in 2014. Research for the project centred on call-centre workers in the Philippines, who typically work night hours in order to service American customers during US daytime.

In a series of motorized sculptural installations, the artists combine video footage of these workers, filmed in Manila, with various cheap mass-produced materials found in this and many other cities. Yet the artists do not present the work as being in any straightforward way “about” these Filipino workers, or the economic and other inequalities that their circumstance reveals. Instead, more abstract and philosophical concerns are flirted with, including in relation to time, space, and contemporary technologies.

The installation forms an immersive experience. This work is informed by long-term preoccupation and careful attention to social, economic and political realities in the Philippines that are shared by many Southeast Asian nations. Yet “Leak Light Time Heat” is quite deliberately not presented as an educational or activist project.