Raphaela Vogel & Khvay Samnang: Capsule 09/10

Capsule 09/10
With two individual installations by German artist Raphaela Vogel (b. 1988 in Nuremberg) and Cambodian artist, Khvay Samnang (b. 1982 in Svay Rieng) Haus der Kunst continues its successful series of Capsule exhibitions for the fifth time. This series provides young, international artists with a distinct conceptional vision the opportunity to develop and exhibit a new work.

Capsule 09: Raphaela Vogel, A Woman’s Sports Car
In A Woman’s Sports Car, which Raphaela Vogel created for her exhibition at Haus der Kunst, the artist places viewers in a spectacular but unstable setting. A dualchannel projection beams from the headlights of a rotating, canary-yellow sports car, a 1981 Triumph Spitfire. The cones of light form a pair of eyes that offer a glance into a spherical world distorted by a 360-degree optic. In her installation, we find ourselves in a landscape in which humans, machines and animals are both fragmented and fused together to form new alliances. In her work the multimedia artist addresses gender issues and the socio-political formation process of seeing and being seen. She explores defined gender roles in an intuitive and physically engaging way, often interweaving autobiographical elements into her work.

Capsule 10: Khvay Samnang Popil
Phnom Penh-based artist Khvay Samnang’s work critically interrogates the multidimensional character of rituals and politics; exposing the humanitarian and ecological impacts of globalization and its links to the waves of colonialism and migration which continually demarcate and define the spaces and temporalities of Southeast Asia. Informed by extended periods of research, Khvay’s work examines the structures and conditions which underpin histories of exchange in both a material and cultural sense. Popil (2018), a multimedia work specially commissioned by Haus der Kunst, develops a complex dance choreography based around the symbolism of the dragon; which both plays towards Euroamerica’s tendency to employ the motif as a blanket symbol for much of East and Southeast Asia, where as its iconography speaks towards a specifically Chinese or Cambodian mode of identity formation.

Special thanks to Studio Botanic and Mok Rotha for the generous support of Capsule 09: Raphaela Vogel and Capsule 10: Khvay Samnang.

Save the Date:
Pathways of Performativity in Contemporary Southeast Asian Art
June 27-28, 2019

The international symposium presents the history of performance art in Southeast Asia, reflecting the political-economic forces, post colonialism and Cold War that shaped Southeast Asia after the Second World War. The symposium brings together renowned academics and curators from the fields of art history, theatre and film, whose work reflects the central role of performance from the 1960s to the present in its ability to combine visual art, theatre, dance, music and political activism in the region.

The symposium is a cooperation with the Goethe-Institut.