Dreaming And Driving

DREAMING AND DRIVING | Screening and Artist Talk by Chia-En Jao with Davy Chou | Monday, May 21st, 6:30 – 9:30PM @ SA SA BASSAC | #18 2E (upstairs) Sothearos Boulevard, Phnom Penh

SA SA BASSAC and Anti-Archive team up for DREAMING AND DRIVING, a screening and discussion event with Taipei-based artist Chia-En Jao and Phnom Penh-based filmmaker Davy Chou. Chia-En Jao widely exhibited REM Sleep and Guggenheim-commissioned Taxi will be introduced by the artist and followed by a Q&A, moderated by Davy. The evening will close with Davy’s Cambodia 2099 to compliment both of Chia-En’s works’ cinematic-documentary approach to social and political realities. | This event is the first Public Program of SA SA BASSAC’s group exhibition On Attachments and Unknowns (19 May– 19 August, 2017) and is made possible with the support of the National Culture and Arts Foundation, Taiwan.

REM Sleep (2011) by Chia-En Jao | Color UHD video, sound, 28 minutes | Multiple languages, Khmer subtitles and English subtitles | In 1994, the Taiwanese government instituted its “Go South Policy,” importing laborers from Thailand, Vietnam, Philippines and Indonesia, who numbered beyond 420,000 by the time artist Chia-En Jao made REM Sleep in close collaboration with curator Amy Huei-Hwa Cheng in 2011. The title indicates a durational sleep state in which capacity to dream vividly is possible due to physiological similarities to waking states. Using the documentary format to record the dreams – often nightmares – of immigrant workers in Taiwan, with a focus on women, REM Sleep reveals anxiety and fear of employers and bureaucracy, longing for home and family, and traumatic instances of return and reunion. While the realm of dreams are well outside what is considered legible, logical or legal evidence, the voices in REM Sleep issue a strong critique of the social and economic systems in which they remain unheard.

Taxi (2016) by Chia-En Jao | Color UHD video, with sound, 79 minutes, 32 seconds | Mandarin with English subtitles | Adopting a documentary style, the Guggenheim-commissioned video by Chia-En Jao Taxi presents conversations between the artist and various taxi drivers while en route to historically contested places in Taipei. Recording from the back passenger seat, Chia-En gently incites questions; discussions ensue, offering drivers’ personal anecdotes and memories of various political periods in Taiwan including legacies of Japanese occupation, martial law, and the Cold War to more recent news such as Brexit and tensions with mainland China. Chia-En’s collection of alternate histories enables individual experiences to be voiced, resisting the totalizing bias of history-telling.

Cambodia 2099 (2014) by Davy Chou | 21 minutes | In Khmer with English subtitles | Cambodia 2099 is set on Phnom Penh’s Diamond Island, the country’s pinnacle of modernity and the ultimate socializing destination of today’s urban youth, who both parade and idle on their motorbikes. Two friends tell each other about the dreams they had the night before, unfolding an ambient portrait of today’s transforming Cambodian capitol with flashes through its troubled past and aspirational future. Cambodia 2099 was selected at Cannes’ Director’s Fortnight Director’s Fortnight and won the Grand Prix of Festival du Film Vendome, both 2014.

Chia-En Jao 饒加恩 (b. 1976, Taichung, Taiwan) approaches contemporary art practice as a set of experiments that deal with the ideas of identity, borders, shared experience, and the power relationship between different aesthetic and political regimes. Chia-En holds a Dipôme National Supérieur d’Arts Plastiques, École Nationale Supérieur des Beaux-Arts, Paris (2004), and an MFA in Fine Art, Goldsmiths College, London (2007). Notable exhibitions include Tales of Our Time, Guggenheim Museum, New York (2017), Asia Pacific Triennial, Brisbane (2012), 9th Shanghai Biennial (2012), REM Sleep, TheCube, Taipei (2011), and Taipei Biennial (2010). Chia-En lives in Taipei.

Chou Davy (b. 1983, Fontenay-aux-Roses, France) is a French-Cambodian director and producer. He founded the French production company Vycky Films and the Cambodian production company Anti-Archive. Davy Chou gained attention in 2011 with Golden Slumbers, documentary about the birth of Cambodian cinema in the 60’s, and its destruction by the Khmer Rouge. The film was selected at Berlinale Forum and Busan International Film Festival. His short film Cambodia 2099 was selected at Cannes’s Directors’ Fortnight 2014. His first feature, Diamond Island, was selected at Cannes’ Critics’ Week 2016, winning the SACD award.

Anti-Archive is a Cambodian film production company created in 2014 by filmmakers Davy Chou, Steve Chen, and Kavich Neang, with Park Sungho joining in 2016. Anti-Archive produces and co-produces fiction and documentary films by the emerging, new generation of Cambodian filmmakers, as well as films by international, independent directors shooting in Cambodia and Southeast Asia. Deliberately provocative, the name Anti-Archive invites one to rethink the relationship of films and filmmakers with the past and history. Anti-Archive has produced and co-produced films which have subsequently premiered around the world including feature films. Dream Land by Steve Chen (Locarno), Diamond Island by Davy Chou (Cannes’ Critic Week), Turn Left Turn Right by Douglas Seok (Torino), the documentary Waxing Moon by Adrien Genoudet (Entrevues Belfort), and short films Three Wheels (Busan) and Goodbye Phnom Penh by Kavich Neang. http://www.antiarchive.com