Exhibitions
Sa Sa Art Projects
Sep 05 - Oct 31, 2020
All images by Courtesy of Sa Sa Art Project
Colony presents a new large-scale, immersive, and mesmerising installation by artist Eng Rithchandaneth. The artist molds and architects a seeming network of organism colony that pervades and takes over Sa Sa Art Projects’ whole exhibition space. Drawing from animism and politics of organising, the artist raises the tension between natural and human-made structures and their impacts.
Daneth grew up in a southern neighborhood of Phnom Penh city, a place surrounded by Bassac River, lakes, farms, and animals. Humans and non-humans co-existed. Soon enough, urbanisation has drastically changed that. Calm river was bombarded by sand-extracting ferries. Lakes were filled up for housing and concrete. Animals and vegetation were slowly disappearing. Yet, one kind of species remained resilient: termite.
Struck by termites and their mounds sprawling on her land and around her village, Daneth considers their relationships with humans. Termites are considered as pests, as they often ruin human habitats. However, there is an animistic tradition for people to setup a shrine at a termite mound, believed to have a protective spirit. Some mounds grow atop burials. As wishes and prayers go, moral and greed often collide.
Termites are eusocial insects that have a complex system of organisation and reproduction in order to grow and sustain themselves as a colony. This organisational structure is also seen in human social organisation from the beginning of time.
Here at the exhibition space, the artist meticulously constructed a colony of mounds and nests. They are connected in clusters through a network of routes. One primary mound dominates the exhibition floor while being enveloped by its secondary nests. Made from paper-mache, the monochromatic organic structures appear like living, pervasive concretes.
In this exhibition the artist created a new world for the audience to encounter. In this world, humans appear less significant as Daneth’s Colony takes over, challenging the perception of space, scale, and materiality. By imagining the agency of termites and their organic system, Daneth raises the usually complex relations between humans and non-humans, as well as human-made and nonhuman-made structures.
Courtesy of Sa Sa Art Projects [ Facebook ]
Eng Rithchandaneth (b. 1993, Phnom Penh) took art classes at Sa Sa Art Projects, and holds a Bachelor in Design from SETEC Institute. She often works with sculpture and installation, regularly employing natural materials. Her work largely deals with issues of urbanization and development in Cambodian context questioning power structures and their relations with environment and nationhood. Her select group exhibitions include The Cities (2020), Treeline, Siem Reap; Currents: Phnom Penh Art & Urban Festival (2019), Phnom Penh; Forced Marriage under the Khmer Rouge (2018), Bophana Center, Phnom Penh; Kraanh Norneal, Sensing the Capital Project (2017), Sa Sa Art Projects; Poetic Topographies (2016), SA SA BASSAC; and Futurographies: Cambodia-USA-France, New York, Phnom Penh and Paris (2015-2016). Daneth was an artist-in-residence at Vermont Studio Center, USA (2015) and S-AIR, Sapporo, Japan (2016).
