Open Studio: Enzo Camacho and Amy Lien
Wednesday 22 February 2017, 6:00-8:00pm
In English with Khmer translation
Arb/Krasue has appeared at Sa Sa Art Projects
Collaborating artists Amy Lien and Enzo Camacho will present their work-in-progress produced over the course of the past six weeks of their Pisaot residency with Sa Sa Art Projects. During this time, Lien and Camacho led a series of weekly seminars with an open discussion group of artists, students, activists and those in Phnom Penh’s creative communities. Based on the artists’ practice concerning the way ideas transform as they move, the seminar explored several thematic topics of art systems within globalized exchange, as well as their socio-economic and cultural conditions. The group discussed critical texts and films, paired with examples of artistic strategies from Cambodia, the region, and beyond.
Alongside this discursive engagement, Lien and Camacho have been developing a new body of work exploring Arb/Krasue, a Cambodian and Southeast Asian folk mythology. The story goes that Arb/Krasue is a beautiful but mysterious woman, who appears to be a regular person by day. However, at night her head detaches from her body and flies off with the internal organs still dangling from her neck. With this split body, she is predatory but also vulnerable. Considering Arb/Krasue as a method and source of knowledge, the artists dissect and reconstruct the myths of today within contemporary conditions of a globalized economy. Clay head sculptures adapted from ancient Buddhist-Hindu figures attach to “spectral” projector bodies which beam video montage onto the floor. The videos feature two young dancers-in-training wearing deconstructed “high-fashion” garments in various popular new date-night commercial sites around Phnom Penh. While exciting and stimulating, these venues seem to promise hopeful yet uncertain futures for the motivated bodies.
Lien and Camacho’s residency is made possible through shared funding initiative with the artists and the support from Foundation for Art Initiatives (FfAI).
About the artists
Amy Lien (b. 1987) & Enzo Camacho (b. 1985) have been collaborating since 2009, initially between New York and Manila, which has set the conditions for a practice that attempts to feed back certain fissures in globalised exchange. They maintain a restless flexibility with regards to material processes, less concerned with the interplay between established artistic mediums (sculpture, photography, painting, performance, etc.) than with the interplay between physical materials, living bodies, and information.
They have had previous solo exhibitions at Green Papaya Art Projects (Quezon City, Philippines), 47 Canal (New York, USA) and Mathew Gallery (Berlin, Germany). They have been Artists-in-Residence at am Artspace in Shanghai (2016), the NTU Centre for Contemporary Art in Singapore (2016) and Gluck50 in Milan (2016). They write for various art publications (including Texte zur Kunst and Flash Art) and recently published an artist ebook with Badlands Unlimited. Their most recent exhibition consisted of a series of figurative sculptures, each split in half and distributed across several different venues in Berlin (more information: manananggalinberlin.tumblr.com).
