TP directed by Vuth Lyno
- Vuth Lyno, UNTAC project, 2016. Courtesy of the artist.
The artist will lead a course for a group of students coming from different disciplinary backgrounds. The objective is to foster their university studies with the possibility of experimenting with new reflexive formats to present scientific knowledge through an artistic, and innovative, transdisciplinary approach.
For this session, the Cambodian artist Vuth Lyno, with the assistance of four art students, is invited to work with the teachers of the university so as to set up a pedagogical and artistic project for a total period of 24 hours.
Taking the UNTAC (United Nation Transitional Authority of Cambodia) as a starting point for this TP, the artist offers the participating students to consider their own research topic through the prism of the effect produced by external forces on the journey of objects, of individuals.
Vuth Lyno (b. 1982, Phnom Penh) is an artist, curator and artistic director of Sa Sa Art Projects, Phnom Penh’s only artist-run space, located in the historic and presently endangered neighborhood known as the White Building. Vuth’s practice is primarily participatory and collaborative in nature, engaging specific Cambodian communities and the cultures unique to them. Vuth holds a Master of Art History from the State University of New York, Binghamton, supported by Fulbright fellowship.
Vuth is an artist-in-residence at Betonsalon, Paris (2016) and was a participant of International Art Residency, Para Site, Hong Kong (2015).
On Friday mornings, from 9.30 a.m until 12.00 p.m.:
Friday, September 30: Session 1
Cambodian artist Vuth Lyno, director of this term’s Académie vivante (Living academy), introduced the foundations of the discussion, reflection and creation that will take place during upcoming sessions of the practical course. UNTAC (or United Nations Transitional Authority of Cambodia) has been presented as a metaphor for the intervention of an external and disrupting element that has somehow triggered a deviation of trajectories. In other words, the artist questions the relation between individuals and the context in which they evolve, and interrogates the extent to which one’s surroundings can influence one’s path.
Every participant will appropriate this relation between two separate elements in regard to their own research interest. Participants will explore concepts of contagion, contamination, interruption or upheaval.
Participants took part in two games during this first session, thus encouraging tactile and bodily experiences.
- The maze game invited participants to orient themselves , solely by communicating through their movements.
- The second game consisted in transmitting messages to one another by , solely by means of mime.
Friday, October 7: Session 2
Four groups were formed around themes that would guide later teamwork:
1) Memory and Identity
2) Environment and Expression
3) Knowledge and/or Power
4) Fiction and representation
Vuth Lyno introduced the modernization process of Cambodia in the 1960s. He addressed both the architecture of Phnom Penh, the capital city, and the formation of the modern Khmer culture, which occurred at the same time period.
In order to invite participants to conceptualize and take distance from material objects, Vuth Lyno proposed an exercise consisting in exhausting the meaning of an artwork by discussing it for 10 minutes.
This introduced the following set of questions, which targeted the notion of concept, its definition, and its use in fields of scientific and artistic research.
Friday, October 14: Session 3
Elaborating on topics that were raised during preceding sessions, the third meeting started with a game: seated in circle, participants passed on a brick to each other while inventing, every time they had the brick in their hands, a new use to this object until 100 possible functions have been assigned to it.
This exercise encouraged taking a step back from the material, practical use of an object while inviting to resort to one’s own imagination.
Friday, October 21: Session 4
Meeting at the Réserve des arts to collect and get inspired by material in order to prepare for following sessions dedicated to materializing ongoing projects.
Friday, October 28 and Friday, November 4: sessions 5 and 6
Participants gathered in groups to discuss and elaborate on their projects and to try out different methods of displaying their works in the space of Bétonsalon.
Saturday, November 5: Final session and display of the works
The material results of works produced by the four groups were presented during the last day of the Anywhere But Here exhibition at Bétonsalon - Center for Art and Research, proposing an intervention along existing exhibited works and within the space itself.
Open to everyone: inscription at publics@betonsalon.net.
The Académie vivante is supported by the Fondation Daniel et Nina Carasso.
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