1975 Exhibition at Topaz Arts

TOPAZ ARTS is pleased to present 1975 - a group exhibition curated by Chuong-Dai Vo featuring works by Anida Yoeu Ali, Amy Lee Sanford, and LinDa Saphan.

photos: © TOPAZ ARTS, Inc.

“1975″
Anida Yoeu Ali | Amy Lee Sanford | LinDa Saphan
curated by Chuong-Dai Vo

On view April 27 to May 26, 2013

Viewing hours are Saturdays 12–4pm or by request at info@topazarts.org.
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This group exhibition brings together three diasporic Cambodian women artists whose works exemplify the dynamic contemporary art scene in Phnom Penh: Anida Yoeu Ali’s photographs and video installation recall life in a refugee camp following the fall of the Khmer Rouge; Amy Lee Sanford’s video and photographs share with viewers the process of uncovering a difficult history, the turmoil of the late 1960s and 1970s, as told in letters written by a father she never knew; and LinDa Saphan’s elevation view drawings of apartment buildings and architectural monuments in current-day Phnom Penh take us back to her mother’s fond memories of living there. more >

read recent feature in Queens Chronicle >

Excerpt from the exhibition catalogue:

I Come Home to You
By Chương-Đài Võ

Inflation
Night raids
Bombings

300 rockets fell on Phnom Penh
November 1973 to January 1974

Turned down a Ford grant
May apply for Ambassador to India

Send clothes for the baby, vitamins

Amy Lee Sanford left Phnom Penh in November 1972, at age two, with her stepmother Barbara. Her father, a professor of art history and aesthetics at Université de Phnom Penh, had asked his wife to come for the baby. Barbara asked him to go with them to Boston. He didn’t.

He left hundreds of letters, written to Barbara from 1968 to 1975.
Night raids, teaching, research. His baby.

An intellectual, he was among the estimated two million people killed by the Khmer Rouge during their reign from 1975 to 1979.

The father became a concept.

For her project Unfolding, Sanford creates a single channel video installation of herself scanning the letters in Boston, where she has kept them in storage since her stepmother’s death. Accompanied by print images of the letters, which are thin and fragile like onion skin, the video makes visible the excavation of history through repetition—the unfolding, scanning, and folding of objects that hold a tenuous world in their delicate creases. By sharing the process of opening these letters, the artist invites the viewer to reflect on how our daily routines are affected by war and genocide, and how objects from the past can help us live in the present.

When the Khmer Rouge emptied the cities and forced everyone to return to their villages of birth, they began a nightmare that would leave a quarter of the eight-million population dead by torture, starvation, disease and hard labor, and at least another million forced into exile. Artists, intellectuals, the middle class, landowners, and anyone associated with the Lon Nol government were among the first executed. LinDa Saphan’s father was an engineer who disguised himself as a fisherman. Saphan’s mother was a teacher who taught French, wore glasses and had soft hands. She cut her hair short, broke her glasses and hid them, scratched her hands on the ground until her skin bled and her nails were caked in dirt. The KR thought she was the village idiot, and she and her husband survived their reign doing hard labor.

In 1982, Saphan left Cambodia for Montreal, Canada, with her mother and siblings. Her mother supported the family by working as a seamstress. After school, Saphan would help her sew, and her mother would tell her stories about Phnom Penh—visiting her favorite haunts, cruising the streets on a Vespa, listening to the soft flutter of the breeze as neighbors passed the night on the balcony.

Saphan’s drawings on rice paper titled Still Loving It are panoramic views of shop houses and apartment buildings in downtown Phnom Penh. A vernacular architectural style imported by the Chinese and common in Southeast Asia, these shop houses are three to four stories high and split between a ground floor reserved for commercial use and residential spaces above. Among the drawings are four of “The White Building”, an apartment complex built in the 1960s to house civil servants. In the post-KR years, the once modern and luxurious structure became a slum for artists, students and civil servants. On an early morning in 2008, the police forcibly evicted the residents. Saphan’s drawings pay tribute to the people who were forced to leave their homes, first by the anti-capitalist KR, and then by a post-1979 government comprising former KR officers eager to embrace global capitalism and development.

Like thousands of Cambodians in the post KR period, Anida Yoeu Ali and her family had to seek safety in a refugee camp. The camps along the border with Thailand comprised hundreds of rows of barracks made out of thatch and branches.

Her family does not talk about that time or about the KR years. But when her mother saw television images of people standing in line during the First Gulf War, she said, “It’s happening again”.

Ali’s Camp Series is a video installation and set of four images of the family in the camps. For each print, an image of a photograph is silk screened onto fabric; on top of that image, a part of the same image that has been cut is silk screened a second time, and then stitched. On top of those images is barbed wire embroidered in black. The printing, cutting, and stitching perform a process of tracing, retracing, narrating, and living. While the prints present snapshots of the family in the camps, the animation video projected onto a screen made out of mosquito nets enacts the past not as a static history written by a genocidal regime, but as a present in which the living tell their own histories. Like Sanford and Saphan, Ali’s project engages with the past to open up a space not of suffering and oppression, but a space of home, presence in absence.

About the Curator:
Chuong-Dai Vo is an independent curator and writer based in New York City and a Visiting Scholar at MIT. Her curatorial and scholarly work focus on how war and diasporic migrations affect the production of literature, cinema and visual culture, in particular in the circuits between Asia and the U.S. She has received fellowships from the Mellon Foundation, the Fulbright Program and the University of California Pacific Rim Research Program, among others. Her most recent project was a co-curated group exhibition titled War is for the Living, reviewed in the New York Times >

About the Artists:
Anida Yoeu Ali is an artist and scholar whose works span performance, installation, video, poetry, public encounters, and political agitation. Utilizing an interdisciplinary approach to artmaking, her installation and performance works investigate the artistic, spiritual and political collisions of a hybrid transnational identity. She is a collaborative partner with Studio Revolt, an independent artist-run media lab in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, where she currently resides. For further details about her work and process, visit www.studio-revolt.com.

Amy Lee Sanford is a Cambodian American visual artist who works cross media, from drawing and sculpture to performance and video. Her art addresses the evolution of emotional stagnation, and the lasting psychological effects of war, including aspects of guilt, loss, alienation, and displacement. She was born in Phnom Penh during the Lon Nol government of the early 1970s; her father, an intellectual, sent her out of the country with his American wife nine months before the Khmer Rouge took over the country. Currently, she is an artist-in-residence with the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, through the Season of Cambodia events taking place in New York. Her work can be seen online at www.amyleesanford.com.

LinDa Saphan was born in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. Fleeing the Khmer Rouge regime, she and her family lived for more than two decades in Canada and France. In 2005, Saphan co-organized Visual Arts Open, a landmark contemporary art festival that introduced Cambodian artists to the international art market. Recognizing a lack of resources to support women artists in Cambodia, she established the “Selapak Neari” program the same year, providing workshops, networking opportunities, and an exhibition space for emerging women artists. At the same time, she curated the first group exhibition at the Ministry of Fine Arts and Culture. Saphan earned a PhD in Social Anthropology from the Sorbonne in 2007. Her work can be seen online at www.saphan.info.

Acknowledgments:
This exhibition is presented by TOPAZ ARTS Visual Arts Program, supported, in part, by NYC Department of Cultural Affairs, and Materials for the Arts – a program of DCA and the Dept. of Sanitation & Board of Education.

Additional funding for “1975” has been made possible by the Puffin Foundation. The artists and curator thank AYA Designs, Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU, CUE Foundation, The Sylvia Wald and Po Kim Art Gallery, Van Cleve Fine Arts, and the organizers of Season of Cambodia. In addition, we are grateful for the generous support of Matt Horochowski, Dana Langlois, Paul Lovelace, John Pirozzi, and individual donors. Amy, LinDa and Chương-Đài  would like to acknowledge Anida Yoeu Ali for initiating the idea for this exhibition.

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