25

2018 - Film & Video (Film & Video)

32:07 minutes

Vuth Lyno

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25 by Vuth Lyno addresses the legacy of the UN’s 1992-93 peacekeeping operation in Cambodia (UNTAC). This operation steered the country’s transition out of three decades of war and destruction—civil war, the Khmer Rouge era (1975-79), and the factional conflicts of the 1980s—towards a new, ‘democratic’ future. It was the most ambitious and successful UN peacekeeping mission of its time. Yet, it ultimately produced new cycles of injustice. For this work, Lyno undertook archival and ethnographic research concerning a generation of children born of relationships between UNTAC peacekeepers and Cambodian partners. Many UNTAC children have Cambodian mothers but have lost touch with their African fathers. They embody the complex relationships between Cambodia and other impoverished nations, engineered and mediated by the UN. Against a studio backdrop redolent of UNTAC’s own TV channel, three such people—now young adults—share their experiences of cultural othering and their views on the UN mission. The clean, frontal composition gestures at once toward the video aesthetics of contemporary mass culture, and more instrumental genres in which the medium has served evidentiary and testimonial purposes. Through candid and intensely personal storytelling, this work achieves a succinctness that leaves room for the viewer to unpack the complexity of this history directly from the young people’s lived experience. In the global contexts of today’s febrile racial politics, the crisis of faith in multilateralism, and the urgent renewal of histories of solidarity, this work reminds us of the power of first-person testimony to cut through the noise of ideology.

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Vuth Lyno’s artistic practice operates at a crucial intersection of contemporary Khmer culture. Working across many forms including photography, audio-visual installation, sculpture, and architecture, Lyno engages overlooked histories, notions of community and place-making, and the production of social relations. His raw materials are often the narratives of Cambodian people, gleaned by way of quasi-ethnographic, archival, and visual research, and activated through participatory encounter, pedagogical experiment, and tactile construction. Like artists in many developing nations, Lyno wears many hats: researcher, educator, curator, manager, advocate, and community developer. The independent organizations, such as Sa Sa Art Projects, that Lyno has co-founded, contributed to, and built over the years, are crucial links in a lively, but patchy art sector largely devoid of public-institutional support. They are pivotal for education and training; they are the key conduits for international discourse and opportunities; they are the main nurseries of experimentation.

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Colors:

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• dance.n.01
• family.n.01
• testimony.n.02
• government.n.01
• war.n.01
• politics.n.01