I arrived in Battambang, Cambodia, late last year via a 5-hour bus ride from Siem Reap.
Ben Valentine
Ben Valentine is an independent writer living in Cambodia. Ben has written and spoken on art and culture for SXSW, Salon, SFAQ, the Los Angeles Review of Books, YBCA, ACLU, de Young Museum, and the Museum of the Moving Image, to name a few.
Posted inArt
Every Five Years, Ragnar Kjartansson Asks His Mother to Spit on Him
REYKJAVÍK, Iceland — “I was told to spit on my own beloved son over and over … Everything went according to plan — I spat and spat,” so goes the essay for Ragnar Kjartansson’s exhibition Me and My Mother.
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How Artists Can Help Us Conceive of New Flags and Monuments for the US
All flags bear the stain of conquest.
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An Exhibition That Ticks Its Way Toward Apocalypse
BRUSSELS — Entering Patrick Bernatchez’s exhibition Les Temps Inacheves (French for “unfinished time”) at the Argos Centre for Art and Media, you are first confronted by “Lost in Time 33-66” (2014), an amplified metronome and a record player.
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What Happens When a Feminist Artist Interviews a Pickup Artist
Tired of the one-sided and often misogynistic narrative of the pickup artist (PUA), visual art Angela Washko wanted to provide a more complex understanding of PUAs by recasting their stories from women’s perspectives.
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Where Are the Women of Color in New Media Art?
Not long ago I wrote an article celebrating the work being done by cyberfeminist collective Deep Lab. After the piece was published, a writer, curator, and friend wrote to me to express concerns about the lack of women of color artists in the group.
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Cyberfeminists Go Deep on Big Data, Privacy, and Surveillance
In mid-December, 12 hackers, artists, coders, and activists gathered to tackle issues of privacy, surveillance, anonymity, and big data as they manifest in our society.
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Nurturing New Art in Vietnam
HO CHI MINH CITY — Galerie Quynh’s current exhibition, The Cosmos and the Sea, features new work by Los Angeles–based artist Christine Nguyen. Her large drawings and photographs provoke a vibrant imagined landscape of geometric forms and ephemeral figures.
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Artist Sells Naming Rights to a Landfill
Common wisdom has it that when you’re facing a problem, one of the first steps should be to identify the heart of the matter and name it. The sooner the issue is named, the sooner you can discuss what’s to be done. Tokyo-based artist Yoshinori Niwa is taking this idea to a comical extreme in his attempt to address landfills in metro Manila.
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Free for Over Half a Century, Indianapolis Museum of Art Will Begin Charging Admission
In March of last year, the new director of the Indianapolis Museum of Art, Charles Venable, cut 29 jobs to relieve a budget problem. While the museum’s endowment is one of the 10 largest in the country, Venable apparently still believes more must be done to ensure the financial success of the institution, namely, moving from free general admission to $18.
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Death and Trade in Vietnam
HO CHI MINH, Vietnam — The exhibition Come to [What] End? tackles big questions in the way that art does best.
Posted inArt
The Ghost Sounds of Hanoi, Conjured by an App
HANOI — The first thing that struck me about this city was the noise. I arrived by a sleepy overnight train from China, where most of the scooters I’d seen were silent electric bikes. Here the noise was deafening.
