Conduits: Open studio with artist Kai Lossgott
Friday 23 December 2016, 6:00-8:00pm
In English with Khmer translation
"Maybe this is a problem. Maybe the problem with toilets and basins is that you can flush them. Maybe light switches should not just turn on. At least, these things should not happen in the absence of our experience. We need to see and hear and feel the wires and pipelines, and where they go… Perhaps it is not the postindustrial culture that is the problem, but the modern design for comfort. Comfort should not mean that we spend our life in a little room searching google... while there is a whole world out there waiting for us.” – Kai Lossgott.
After five weeks of staying at Sa Sa Art Projects as a Pisaot artist-in-residence, amongst almost three-thousand people in Phnom Penh’s inner city low-income housing, the White Building, Kai Lossgott presents a series of thought experiments in the form of stop motion photography and drawings. In his new works, the artist has engaged with eco-architectural philosophy, returning to his preoccupation with the human ability to perceive scales of time and space, and arrange our behaviour within them. The White Building is a pioneering work of modernist social housing designed in 1963 by Cambodian architect Lu Ban Hap. It will be demolished within the next year or so to make way for a resource-intensive but lucrative commercial development.
In Kai Lossgott’s videos, ants track their way through the building, and the passages of sun, moon and city light are made visible against the walls. Interested in the potential of person agency and health within the environmental crisis that is the anthropocene, Kai Lossgott considers the symbolic worth of multiple, simple and everyday consumer objects whose lifespan continues within and outside of our human bodies. These include a grain of rice, a tea leaf, or coconut milk, all housed within their own architectures or containers, along with other inevitable unidentified particles such as dust or hair. These works are exhibited as part of a three-storey wall drawing and video installation, which maps relating ecological ideas and processes in one of the White Building’s inner stairways once providing access to two rain water tanks on the roof, replaced by plumbing in 1998, or descending to one of five wells, now garbage dumps.
Kai Lossgott’s residency is made possible through partnership between Sa Sa Art Projects and Sylt Foundation, with additional support from Foundation for Art Initiatives (FfAI).
About artist
Kai Lossgott (b. 1980, Marktoberdorf, Germany) seeks out small, ephemeral, and discarded fragments at our feet. He works across media; his lens-based and performative practice makes visible stress, trauma and friction in the life cycles of humans and their use of ‘things.’ He reads the world through the streets of the constantly changing African metropolis he calls home.
The artist’s videos are screened at various platforms, from local street corners, to international museums and galleries, as well as at film festivals. He is also known for his installations, public performance collaborations and curating moving image. Kai was the winner of the Barclays l’Atelier Award for African Artists 2015. His work has been shown at the Dak’art Biennale, Dakar; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Institute of Contemporary Art, Zagreb; Johannesburg Art Gallery and Museum Africa, Johannesburg; Arnot Art Museum, New York; and Whitechapel Gallery, London.
Kai holds tertiary qualifications in dance theatre, documentary film, creative writing and fine art, including an MA from the University of Cape Town. As speaker and community arts facilitator, he publishes and lectures internationally, most recently at the Royal Academy of Arts, Antwerp.
