For Home and Country
In line with her previous commercial and institution exhibitions which have provided engaging social and political commentary on Southeast Asia, curator Iola Lenzi collaborated with the Vietnamese artist Bùi Công Khánh on his exhibition For Home and Country, for which he created new installations.
Viewers walk into the gallery and observe a miniature slum, only to find that they are being surveilled by two CCTV cameras at either end of the room, while two large screens project this audience surveillance in real time. Khánh tackles issues of social inclusion/exclusion through painstakingly replicating a real ghetto which stands in the centre of a city and on prime real estate. Conversationally, he mentions how his visit there was interrupted by a group of men who immediately assessed him as an outsider, asked him a number of questions, deleted images from his camera and escorted him home (police or mafia? It was unclear); however a discreet voice recorder in Khánh’s pocket captured this aggression. This cacophony of abuse is cleverly run over a video of a shanty town being submerged in torrential rain. Plastic red chairs float away while clothes hanging on a wire are drenched by an intense rainfall, noisily ricocheting off tin roofs. But is this vision real or simulated?
Viewers also have to move through a swinging doorway, Commitment Culture, on which are inscribed the official rules every Vietnamese citizen must abide by. A box containing alphabets from this very contract invites audiences to rearrange them into a phrase of their choosing, thereby involving the otherwise passive viewer in a small but subversive act of resistance and individual thinking. The context of this performance in Singapore is significant, as