CAS Event: Urgent Elements: Eco-Video from Southeast Asia
Khvay Samnang & UuDam Tran Nguyen
Tuesday, March 5 from 6:30-7:45PM
Location: Visual Arts Complex, Auditorium 1B20
Next Tuesday is the first in a series of Eco-Video co-sponsored by CAS.
Khvay Samnang is a founding member of Stiev Selapak, an art collective dedicated to experimental arts practice in Cambodia and an engagement with historical transformations and political violence wrought by regimes such as the Khmer Rouge. Through the expressive medium of dance, Khvay’s moving image work depicts the illegal extraction of sand from the country’s beaches and rivers for commercial land development in Singapore (Where is My Land? 2014, 14 min), as well as the threat of a hydro-electric project in southwestern Cambodia that could destroy the livelihood of the indigenous Chong people in that region (Preah Kunlong, 2016-17, 19 min).
UuDam Tran Nguyen’s video work, Serpents’ Tails (2015, 15 min) charts air pollution in Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon) caused by motorbikes. As in Khvay’s work, Nguyen also employs dancers to interact with and enliven the landscape. In this case, however, it is the rapidly transforming urban environment of Vietnam. Building on mythologies such as the Greek Laocoön, the Vietnamese Thanh Giong, and the Hindu Churning of the Ocean of Milk, the video portrays a dramatic conflict between human motorcyclists and “serpents’ tails,” or the exhaust of motorbikes trapped within elongated, stitched-together plastic bags.