Originally from Minneapolis, Erin Gleeson’s engagement with Cambodian history and art began more than 15 years ago, through a human rights research grant awarded by the University of Minnesota. Since then, the focus of her work has been researching methodologies of human rights education; and working on a photographic archive on genocide and prison torture from the Khmer Rouge regime.
After teaching liberal arts at Cambodia’s first private university, she began curating art exhibitions in 2005-2006, where she focused on reviving practices of senior artists as well as developing platforms for emerging contemporaries to exhibit their work. Works by some of these artists — such as Svay Ken, Svay Sareth, Nov Cheanick, Tith Kanitha, Than Sok, to name a few — are part of prominent collections at the Singapore Art Museum, Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, and National Gallery of Victoria. Her most recent curatorial project, which includes these practitioners, is an exhibition of ten leading Cambodian artists in India. The exhibition, mounted at Akar Prakar Contemporary, New Delhi, traces diverse approaches to the form of abstraction in the practices of Cambodian artists born between 1933-1990.
(‘Out of Line: Tracing Abstraction Within Contemporary Art in Cambodia’ is on view at Akar Prakar Contemporary from 16th November, 2019 – 11th January, 2020)
Tith Kanitha; Untitled; Hand coiled steel wire; 12 x 14 x 14 inches; 2019 (on view at Akar Prakar Contemporary, New Delhi)
In this conversation, Erin Gleeson discusses a multitude of themes relevant to contemporary Cambodian art, such as the challenges of funding and exhibition spaces; and as a response to these, she further talks about her interventions through collaborations with other curators and artists.
Tith Kanitha; Untitled; hand coiled steel wire; 24 x 10 x 7 inches; 2019
As a curator and researcher engaged with Cambodian life and culture for nearly two decades, what are the major challenges and highlights in your experience?
Erin Gleeson: I have appreciated learning from the perspective of being grounded in the Cambodian and Southeast Asian contexts, alongside artists and a very dispersed and diverse array of interlocutors. The highlights or blessings and the challenges are often one in the same. For example, we often are asked about the challenge of “smallness” — in terms of participation, from artists, curators, and writers, or in terms of funding or spaces — yet this has also nurtured self-determination and naturally working together across disciplines in the arts. There is of course the challenge of history and its presence. I have been moved and changed by artist’s practices and works that express the granularity of their personal experiences, emotions, and histories as necessary to their existence — that is, regardless of, and even in the absence of, an infrastructure or market.
Over the years, as micro infrastructures and markets slowly grew, one positive effect was seeing these personal practices perform in the public sphere — whether within our neighbourhood children’s programs or in critics’ reviews when the works’ re-exhibition abroad — by way of interacting with and complicating pervasive violence within many official public histories.
Among the other highlights of your experience include co-founding of initiatives such as FIELDS, a triannual, itinerant residency program in Cambodia; and SA SA BASSAC, a non-profit exhibition space, reading room and resource centre in Phnom Penh. What were the specific interventions in each of these initiatives?
I conceived FIELDS, a program with Vera Mey in 2013 and again with May Adadol Ingawanij in 2016 to try and mitigate some habits, inequity and ego within colonial methodologies of art history and the contemporary arts.
One of the founding purposes of SA SA BASSAC was working with artists on their first solo exhibitions. I think of Khvay Samnang’s first SA SA BASSAC solo, Untitled – a bold series of photographs and video documenting his performances at gentrifying sites of suburban Phnom Penh that aimed at pointing to questionable flows of capital and environmental destruction of sand extraction, trafficking and infilling. I can still feel the intense offering of Tith Kanitha’s performance, Heavy Sand – a personalised, intergenerational, feminist exhibitionism that complimented that of the more macro, macho exhibitionism of Untitled. And finally for now, it’s also been rewarding to build a library and reading room at SA SA BASSAC, and see this become so invaluable to the community — known today as Dambaul and run by former SA SA BASSAC community projects manager, now independent curator, Meta Moeng.
Nov Cheanick, Sitting; Acrylic, ink and pencil on canvas; 52.5 x 43.5 inches; 2012
Svay Ken; Hidden body & face; Oil on canvas; 15.5 x 10.5 inches; 1995
It is rare to see a group exhibition of Southeast Asian art in India, much less a show on Cambodian contemporary art. What do you think is the relevance of such an exhibition in the Indian context?
Out of Line is a small survey exhibition that plays with dominant art historical timelines in its reflection on abstraction within the Cambodian context, through materiality, the figure, or an ancient design code called kbach. During my week in Delhi to give a talk and open the exhibition, I heard familiar assumptions we’ve heard in a few contexts where the same artists have exhibited. These include ethnographic readings around perceptions of Cambodia and its people, and critical judgements of particular practices not synching with the dominant time of colonial art history. These are ironically followed by a wish that Cambodian art looked more “Cambodian” instead of feeling “like it could have been made anywhere today.” To these opinions, I guess it goes without saying that the benefits of introducing art from Others in a context in which it is, are rare. Each artist and work expand fixed or closed perceptions, as does the gallery itself.
Yim Maline; Decomposition (Cut); Graphite, charcoal & ink on cardboard; 25 x 29 in (approx.); 2016
In terms of the initial response to ‘Out of Line’, did the viewers — such as artists, researchers or curators — express a desire to re-think the shared histories of India and Southeast Asia?
Some of the other responses to the exhibition were more engaging and offered insight into cotemporal connections between Cambodian and Indian modern, contemporary artists and researchers. I heard young curators speak of the desire to figure relations on non-national or differently geographical terms that illuminate the practices that coloniality and nationhood suppress — such as indigenous ways of knowing, multi-ethnic and religious existence, specific material histories and trading across borders, et cetera. There seemed to be a desire to conceptually unravel and rethink the historically fluid border between India and Southeast Asia, for increased exchange and mutual learning. I hope this exhibition plays a small part in nurturing that desire on different levels over time.
In Conversation With Curator Erin Gleeson
Originally from Minneapolis, Erin Gleeson’s engagement with Cambodian history and art began more than 15 years ago, through a human rights research grant awarded by the University of Minnesota. Since then, the focus of her work has been researching methodologies of human rights education; and working on a photographic archive on genocide and prison torture from the Khmer Rouge regime.
After teaching liberal arts at Cambodia’s first private university, she began curating art exhibitions in 2005-2006, where she focused on reviving practices of senior artists as well as developing platforms for emerging contemporaries to exhibit their work. Works by some of these artists — such as Svay Ken, Svay Sareth, Nov Cheanick, Tith Kanitha, Than Sok, to name a few — are part of prominent collections at the Singapore Art Museum, Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, and National Gallery of Victoria. Her most recent curatorial project, which includes these practitioners, is an exhibition of ten leading Cambodian artists in India. The exhibition, mounted at Akar Prakar Contemporary, New Delhi, traces diverse approaches to the form of abstraction in the practices of Cambodian artists born between 1933-1990.
(‘Out of Line: Tracing Abstraction Within Contemporary Art in Cambodia’ is on view at Akar Prakar Contemporary from 16th November, 2019 – 11th January, 2020)
Tith Kanitha; Untitled; Hand coiled steel wire; 12 x 14 x 14 inches; 2019 (on view at Akar Prakar Contemporary, New Delhi)
In this conversation, Erin Gleeson discusses a multitude of themes relevant to contemporary Cambodian art, such as the challenges of funding and exhibition spaces; and as a response to these, she further talks about her interventions through collaborations with other curators and artists.
Tith Kanitha; Untitled; hand coiled steel wire; 24 x 10 x 7 inches; 2019
As a curator and researcher engaged with Cambodian life and culture for nearly two decades, what are the major challenges and highlights in your experience?
Erin Gleeson: I have appreciated learning from the perspective of being grounded in the Cambodian and Southeast Asian contexts, alongside artists and a very dispersed and diverse array of interlocutors. The highlights or blessings and the challenges are often one in the same. For example, we often are asked about the challenge of “smallness” — in terms of participation, from artists, curators, and writers, or in terms of funding or spaces — yet this has also nurtured self-determination and naturally working together across disciplines in the arts. There is of course the challenge of history and its presence. I have been moved and changed by artist’s practices and works that express the granularity of their personal experiences, emotions, and histories as necessary to their existence — that is, regardless of, and even in the absence of, an infrastructure or market.
Over the years, as micro infrastructures and markets slowly grew, one positive effect was seeing these personal practices perform in the public sphere — whether within our neighbourhood children’s programs or in critics’ reviews when the works’ re-exhibition abroad — by way of interacting with and complicating pervasive violence within many official public histories.
Among the other highlights of your experience include co-founding of initiatives such as FIELDS, a triannual, itinerant residency program in Cambodia; and SA SA BASSAC, a non-profit exhibition space, reading room and resource centre in Phnom Penh. What were the specific interventions in each of these initiatives?
I conceived FIELDS, a program with Vera Mey in 2013 and again with May Adadol Ingawanij in 2016 to try and mitigate some habits, inequity and ego within colonial methodologies of art history and the contemporary arts.
One of the founding purposes of SA SA BASSAC was working with artists on their first solo exhibitions. I think of Khvay Samnang’s first SA SA BASSAC solo, Untitled – a bold series of photographs and video documenting his performances at gentrifying sites of suburban Phnom Penh that aimed at pointing to questionable flows of capital and environmental destruction of sand extraction, trafficking and infilling. I can still feel the intense offering of Tith Kanitha’s performance, Heavy Sand – a personalised, intergenerational, feminist exhibitionism that complimented that of the more macro, macho exhibitionism of Untitled. And finally for now, it’s also been rewarding to build a library and reading room at SA SA BASSAC, and see this become so invaluable to the community — known today as Dambaul and run by former SA SA BASSAC community projects manager, now independent curator, Meta Moeng.
Nov Cheanick, Sitting; Acrylic, ink and pencil on canvas; 52.5 x 43.5 inches; 2012
Svay Ken; Hidden body & face; Oil on canvas; 15.5 x 10.5 inches; 1995
It is rare to see a group exhibition of Southeast Asian art in India, much less a show on Cambodian contemporary art. What do you think is the relevance of such an exhibition in the Indian context?
Out of Line is a small survey exhibition that plays with dominant art historical timelines in its reflection on abstraction within the Cambodian context, through materiality, the figure, or an ancient design code called kbach. During my week in Delhi to give a talk and open the exhibition, I heard familiar assumptions we’ve heard in a few contexts where the same artists have exhibited. These include ethnographic readings around perceptions of Cambodia and its people, and critical judgements of particular practices not synching with the dominant time of colonial art history. These are ironically followed by a wish that Cambodian art looked more “Cambodian” instead of feeling “like it could have been made anywhere today.” To these opinions, I guess it goes without saying that the benefits of introducing art from Others in a context in which it is, are rare. Each artist and work expand fixed or closed perceptions, as does the gallery itself.
Yim Maline; Decomposition (Cut); Graphite, charcoal & ink on cardboard; 25 x 29 in (approx.); 2016
In terms of the initial response to ‘Out of Line’, did the viewers — such as artists, researchers or curators — express a desire to re-think the shared histories of India and Southeast Asia?
Some of the other responses to the exhibition were more engaging and offered insight into cotemporal connections between Cambodian and Indian modern, contemporary artists and researchers. I heard young curators speak of the desire to figure relations on non-national or differently geographical terms that illuminate the practices that coloniality and nationhood suppress — such as indigenous ways of knowing, multi-ethnic and religious existence, specific material histories and trading across borders, et cetera. There seemed to be a desire to conceptually unravel and rethink the historically fluid border between India and Southeast Asia, for increased exchange and mutual learning. I hope this exhibition plays a small part in nurturing that desire on different levels over time.
Interview by Ankush Arora