FCP 09/10

Oh yeah, forgot to mention that the customs officials refused to let our tech guy Andy through with his camera equipment unless we paid them a little baksheesh.  They said US$50 up front and backed down to US$20 in the office.

Andy: They opened it up and said, “What is this for?”  I wanted to tell them, “Child pornography.”

Tsk tsk tsk.

Really very clean airport – tropical flowers and ersatz antique walls with fresh paint. Wedding-cake scaffolds of buildings rising. Futuristic elements. Durians, calamansis, cigarette ads. thumbs up signs for a product called Hello. A tanker spraying water into the road. Beer ad: it’s Miller time. Tiger beer too. Vietnam airlines. 28 degrees centigrade. Siemens. Bike shed. Fern-like trees. Coconuts. Four-faced Brahma on a bright blue house. Picturesque streetways, ipoh-style. Kim Loun Glass work Shop. Total petrol. Revlon. Apple Mart. 9999 Nean Chey hawker stall. Blue cross. tiger Anchor ABC. PTT. Mild Seven. Pochentong internet. Ly Ly Photo. Office of Public work’s Khan. Konica. Tha Ryline tailor. Central Market. Cambodian National Petroleum Authority. Mandarin lettering. Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities. Capa Noniwine. world’s first noni wine. flags, flags, KFC. Caltex. panel technology, austria. Mitsubishi Motors.1,000,000 (unit unspecified on poster) Malaysian flag. Ah Hui Fan Dian. rithy mobile phone shop. Hay Soeung Sell and Buy All Cars. emergency 24 hours tel 023… Tuk-tuks. OSK Indochina Bank. Training and Labour Supply Organisation (TaLSO). Depot de Farmaci. Oriko Furniture Shop. Ly Kim Hong Bakery.

Chip Mong Concrete. Somrach Body Building Club. Total Lubricants Amata Chinese Traditional whisky. Kim Sour Mobile Phone Shop. Yokohama. Hong Wer Grate (Cambodia). Che Guevara T-shirt store. 314. No 312 AB St 142. Barbie haversacks. Truck full of young men in silken pink uniforms. KitDY coffee. Kosoma Haircut. Oscar Hairdresser. Kampung River. Cellcard. U-Cafe. San Miguel. Motorcyclist with blazer. Phnom Penh Office of Cult and Religion. Healthy Shop Natural Paris. Relax Fashion Pte Ltd. ANX Royal. JOTUN innovation from Norway. Sunsilk Shampoo truck. Vattanac Bank. 100 m. Canadia Bank PLC Olympic Branch. Net way. Sihanoruk BlVd. Temple. thank you for no smoking. Health spa…

Hey, we’re here! Checked in and ready to power nap.

Boarding time already, but no-one’s in a hurry. No strip-searches for us to mark the underpants-bomber season, thank goodness.

Keep bumping into the others: Zulkifle at immigration, then TT and Airan, then Heman and Vlatka passed just now while I was trying to log in at the koi pond.

Not sure how this whole blogging from remote locations is going to work. Last time round in Vietnam I could fudge it by altering the times on posts so that they reflected the moment of composition better. But that was on Blogger, not WordPress. Don’t know how to manipulate this programme; just know that it looks a lot cleaner.

Hey! Last call I think.

Well, not all of them. Hu Fang’s flying in at 10pm, and Nelisiwe Xaba will only be here tomorrow at 6am. Mia Habib and Shayna aren’t coming at all, due to medical emergencies.

I promise that I shall introduce each of them individually in due course. Ooh, there’s food, too!

We’re gathered for the 8pm pre-flight briefing. Exits are there, there and there. KS is explaining the history of FCP, and briefing us on what we’ll be up to in the next few days – mostly, the ALTERU (Alternative University) for the post-Khmer Rouge generation of Cambodian artists, who’re a little jaded with the traditional cultural conservation project but have received scant exposure to contemporary cultural ideas, mostly because not much scholarly writing is translated into Khmer.

Most of his points are explained in the post from him below. Interestingly, he points out that post-Communist Cambodia is in some ways similar to post-Communist Eastern Europe. (Four of our 19 artists are from the former Soviet bloc, and one’s from China.)

We’ve got a rough itinerary: in Phnom Penh we’ll split ourselves among Group A for the dancers of Amrita and Group B for the multidisciplinary media archivists of Bophana, then the lot of us, students and instructors, will be off to Siem Reap to do the Angkor Wat trail. But the overall format’s pretty loose: “We’ve done this lab seven times and each time has been more and more unplanned, because the artists prefer more flexibility,” says KS. We’ve even decided to split ourselves into three hotels and forgo company cars for tuk-tuks. Decentralise, baby.

And we are a pretty diverse group of people. The countries most overrepresented are Turkey and Singapore, with three artists each – only one guy originally from Western Europe (Tim Etchells of the UK) and one from North America (Vlatka Horvat from the US). Otherwise, we’ve got reps from the Middle East, East Asia, South Asia, Southeast Asia and Africa – no South America, Oceania or Caribbean isles, but there’s no need to go nuts here.

What kind of education are we gonna be giving the 24 student artists we’ll be encountering?

God knows. Check-in tomorrow at 6:15am.

dear airan, ashok, eszter, filiz, gurur, hafiz, heman, hu fang, janez, janez, jecko, manuel, mustafa, nelisiwe, tarek, tim, vlatka, zul,

welcome to singapore and to the cambodian ALTER U. i am so very happy that you could all join us in this programme.

perhaps it is timely to give you some background information about this specific project. perhaps it is better to start with the experimental project in cambodia as this is the first stage of our work together.

i have been going back and forth between cambodia and singapore with my producer tay tong since 1992 when free elections were conducted by the united nations. in 2000, i revisited phnom penh to invite some artists to the flying circus project 2000. there i met several mature dancers who had been through the ‘concentration camps’ of the khmer rouge regime led by pol pot. as you all know, pol pot wanted to bring cambodia to year zero, to set the country back on the agrarian track of progress. this meant that all urban citizens of cambodia were sent for reeducation. special targets were artists; intellectuals; people who wore glasses, spoke french, who were married to intellectuals. they all became political prisoners. anybody related to the royal court were viewed as enemies of the people, this included the troupe of 300 some royal musicians and dancers. 1.6 mil people are alleged to have died from the khmer rouge regime during those four years of 1975 – 79. the artists that i met in 2000 and subsequently worked with to create a work ‘the continuum: beyond the killing fields’ were court dancers and artists.

the war crime trials of those four years are finally being held in phnom penh since last year. at the moment, the first accused duch who ran the infamous S-21, the phnom penh centre for political prisoners is ongoing (judgement will be given in march 2010).

since then, we have collaborated with other artists in cambodia such as ly daravuth from reyum gallery whom we invited with ‘seams of change’ (an archive of cambodia dress in everyday life) to singapore and to a school of politics (the flying circus project special edition 2005) at the yokohama triennale. Through the arts network asia – a peer group of asian artists in different disciplines and cultural managers, workers who give out microgrants for cultural work and artistic processes across borders in asia – cambodian projects have also been funded such as the street kids and hip hop/rap project tiny toones (read of more under http://www.artsnetworkasia.org). we have continued our research in cambodia during this last decade and you will meet some of these cultural workers, researchers and artists during our stay in cambodia.

since 2005, we have encountered the next generation of artists born AFTER the war, who have graduated from the university of phnom penh in different arts and creative fields, the twenty-somethings. they are not interested in the ongoing trials and they want to move forward from the war. They have a desire to make contemporary work but have not been much exposed to creative strategies from artists who work organically, naturally in communities and environments of contemporary art. their narrative is very different from the generation of mature artists who were directly affected during the war and targeted for their artistry. they studied in a time when preservation and conservation of the arts that were almost lost, were preciously guarded and reinstalled back in cambodian culture. there is hence a fundamental disconnect from art and daily life as the focus has been on classical and traditional (folk) cambodian culture in their training. this tradition of learning still continues in cambodia today.

but the generations of young artists often want more than the classical or the traditional. they are curious and are inevitably drawn to contemporary expressions in dance (the concentrated amrita group of participants) and for the bophana lab participants there is a desire to express themselves through the tools of the everyday which they are immersed in. this second loose group of participants comprise of journalists, film makers, visual artists, fashion designers, writers, architects, anthropologists and range from experienced to those who are in the process. cambodia today is a lively mix of expats, diaspora returnees from the us and france (often escaping from the civil war in cambodia as young children and after studies abroad, coming back to experience cambodia) and young cambodians who are growing up in a completely context from their parents’ generation.

ALTERU is a test project of alternative universities which situates itself in the multiple gaps in cambodia today. it was prompted by the hunger and the need expressed by many young cambodians. it is a study project created by artists for artists. it is aimed at sharing experiences in contemporary making, including our responses to dance, memory and archive in our personal work.

thus far, we have done two pilot programmes with the amrita lab and the bophana lab in november 2009. we brought together singapore choreographer joavien ng, manila choreographer donna miranda and istanbul filmmaker/contemporary artist kutlug ataman to work with amrita. singapore film maker jasmine ng and myself conducted an intense workshop for the bophana lab where we worked directly with the archives of bophana. with the workshops, we realised the differences between pedagogy and art practice, the time tensions but i also personally experienced a lot from my direct exposure to the bophana participants.

perhaps some websites maybe relevant here and the wonderful work they do:
http://www.amritaperformingarts.org
http://www.bophana.org

see u tonight at 72-13 where we will talk more about the planning of the ALTERU.

hug, keng sen

Here’s a head’s up for the next Singapore-based FCP event that’s open to the public:

TheatreWorks / 72-13 presents

Flying Circus Project Platform 03
Superintense

Superintense: 16 January 2010

Airan Berg, Ashok Sukumaran, Eszter Salamon, Filiz Sizanli, Gurur Ertem, Hafiz Dhaou, Heman Chong, Hu Fang, Janez Jansa, Janez Jansa, Jecko Siompo, Manuel Pelmus, Mia Haugland Habib, Mustafa Kaplan, Nelisiwe Xaba, Shaina Anand, Tarek Atoui, Tim Etchells, Vlatka Horvat, Zulkifle Mahmod.

Superintense is a marathon of personal strategies of creativity in the urban context, in our worlds. From one morning to the next, all the FCP artists will have an hour each to present their work, their practice to themselves and a public audience. A table, a projector, a microphone, an audience; which can all be reconstructed into an open space – the same conditions are given to each artist. They are invited to share their practice with the audience; past work, present work, future work. It can take the form of a talk, a lecture-demonstration, a performance, slides, a video, a DJ session, a workshop, a discussion. Without a break, all the artists relentlessly articulate their practice, communicating an insight to the myriad ways of inhabiting, dissolving, thinking, making, living, destroying, rejuvenating. An actor, an audience, a shared space. Take a cigarette pause on the run.

Event Information

Flying Circus Project Platform 03
Superintense

Date: 16 January 2010
Time: 11am till late
Venue: 72-13 Mohamed Sultan Road
Admission: Free

Just a recap of the people who were involved in Expo Zero, to tide all of you over till January.

ONG KENG SEN, Director, Singapore

BORIS CHARMATZ, choreographer, France

MARTINA HOCHMUTH, Researcher, Austria

HEMAN CHONG, Artist, Singapore

YVES-NOEL GENOD, Director/Actor, France

DONNA MIRANDA, Choreographer, Philippines

TORRANCE GOH, Architect, Singapore

JOAVIEN NG, Choreographer, Singapore

JEAN-FRANCOIS CHAIGNAUD, Choreographer, France

PADMINI CHETTUR, Choreographer, India

METTE INGVARTSEN, Choreographer, Denmark

DON ARAVIND, videographer, Singapore

TAY TONG, Producer, Singapore

MALVINA TAN, Artist/Administrator, Singapore

TERENCE LAU, Technical Designer, Singapore

… and many more, including South African video artist Aldo Lee, Singaporean lighting designer Andy Lim, Turkish video artist Kutlug Ataman…

See you in Jan!

Whoa, his second show ever was the Venice Biennale, after being celebrated at the Istanbul Biennale for “semiha b. unplugged” (1997), an 8-hour documentary on Turkey’s first opera singer, whom he filmed almost every day for 14 months in her bedroom. He wasn’t even at the Istanbul opening, ‘cos he was making a feature film in Berlin.

He’s showing us clips from “Women Who Wear Wigs” (1999), which shows stories of phenomenal Turkish women who’ve had strange encounters with wig-wearing: a post-chemotherapy blonde bombshell, a stewardess accused of terrorism, a transsexual sex worker, a Muslim university student who uses a plastic wig instead of a chador. Played simultaneously on a long cacophonic oblong of four screens.

KA: I want viewers to be able to say they saw the piece, but no two people saw the same piece. I want viewers to do the editing itself.

It’s eleven years old and the work’s still popular. Being exhibited currently in Sweden.

KA: They’re people I knew before I became an artist. I don’t call them friends, because as soon as I do the artwork they stop being friends. I’m surgical, as an artist. And of course, Turkish people like to talk about themselves.

Now he’s showing “semiha b. unplugged” – the opening, as the ancient singer rises from her grave, represented by her bedframe, and her insistence that her mother conceived her immaculately, without the necessity of male contact. Self-construction, contradictions. He loves them.

He talks about his return to Turkey after 15 years abroad, and his realisation of how constructed the country is. Kamal Ataturk, the Lee Kuan Yew of Turkey, changed the culture of the nation overnight: Arabic script to Latin script, wearing of the fez outlawed.

KS: Her room is very lush, very Oriental, what Westerners expected of Turkey. But then you stopped doing things that were typical. You stopped being this Turkish delight.

KA: It was only when I travelled to Europe that I realised that their image was so exoticised. Younger countries are actually more open to ideas. And I think I profited from this, because they did not expect to see opera singers instead of women with headscarves, they did not know there were Turkish transsexuals. I really profited from this.

Oh wow. He’s being sued by Semiha’s daughter right now, because she claims that he was only the cameraman, and her mother was the real artist here. Some pieces he hasn’t even screened in Turkey. Though he’s had a bigger scandal in Vienna than in Turkey with “Never My Soul”, which involves sexual intercourse and a lady who takes out her penis behind a curtain. Of course, this was partly because the Viennese curators were dumb enough to project the video in front of a mosque.

Whoa. And now he’s telling us about the democratic revolution in Turkey now: three biennales in different cities, hundreds of different films festivals, and while speaking Kurdish was outlawed two years ago, now you’ve got Kurdish TV channels. KS is applauding the artistic diversity in the country. And yet…

KA: I was the first Turkish artist to be shown in Venice, first one to be shown in Documenta, first one to be collected by MOMA, first one to be nominated for Turner Prize, first one to get the Carnegie Prize. I’ve done all that. And I’ve only been shown once in the Istanbul Biennale. I’ve never had a solo show. There is always this jealousy.

One audience member worries that Semiha’s been exploited by the film, since she looks so ridiculous on video. And well, it turns out we’ve all been hoodwinked. Semiha wanted to be featured because she was pissed off at not being featured on stage, and after the work got attention, she was cast in a show by Robert Wilson, and toured the world, and had her paintings featured in the Venice Biennale (the only Turkish artist besides Kutlug to do so), and when she got to La Scala in Milan, where her arch-competitor Layla performed, she asked the interns if they’d heard of her and they hadn’t, and she announced that she’d go back to Turkey and reveal that the bitch had lied, she’d never been there…

KA: That’s why I don’t believe in “marginal people” or “marginal characters”. Because we are all the stars of our lives. We create our lives, and we are the actors of our own scripts. To me there are the repeating common roles, and those who play them are the middle-class, and there are those who play different roles, and they are the stars.

Ooh. We’re gonna screen the porno-esque one now. “Never My Soul” (2001).

Man, there’s a lot of swinging dick and fake eyelashes in that. And it’s really weirdly synthetic, as he says: improvised lines by the trans performer written down and re-performed over the course of months in the same costumes of drag and bath towels. An impoverished transwoman acting as a Turkish starlet acting Hollywood starlet acting as an impoverished transwoman. He’s a reconstructionist, he says. It’s like Sharazad (i.e. Scheherezade).

KA: And eventually I move to “Journey to the Moon”. Younhave story, and you have documentation, and it becomes history. And geography. What is periphery? Periphery is actually something created to tell the centre, “These are your limits.” This is exotic, but don’t go there because there are people with huge heads and weird legs out there. There are a lot of travel writers during the Middle Ages bullshitting about that.

I think we’ll leave it there.

UPDATE: One last quote.

KA: If I have a group show, I make sure I get the last room, because when they get tired they go to my room and rest. And they’re like, “This is really great! Your room is full of people.” You have to do these things, you know.

And one last piece: “Turkish Delight” (2007), where he recreates a character based based on his old bellydancing female bar friends, for which he gained 20 kilos to become the attractive, repulsive object of desire.

KA: In Moscow, I was seen as protesting against the pwoer of money, and at the Armoury Show all the copies sold out. So they couldn’t decide where I was. And I liked that. I don’t want to position myself.

… and as beautiful as the Gallery Hotel is, it seems that it’s not very good at making sure its guests get Internet connections.

Talked about the Cambodia trip, the Turkish arts scene, the making of “Journey to the Moon”, and the relentless degradation of Western culture into a purely entertainment-fuelled industry (no more Godards in the cineplexes, doncha know).

The interview will be out in the January 72-13 Quarterly, available both in print and online. Other notable facts: the “g” in “Kutlug” is almost silent.

Artists’ talk in half an hour.

Kutlug’s here (seems like KS has been trying to lure him here forever), and this is only fifth time this new film of his has been shown.

“In Turkey, people were laughing, but some of them were crying<” he says.