“Decomposition”
SA SA BASSAC
Phnom Penh, Cambodja
With Decomposition, Yim Maline imaginatively prods and ponders expanded notions of landscape and its representation. After a year of residencies and travel to diverse ecosystems on four continents, Maline continues to cultivate a deeper consciousness around the tenuous state of the global environment, with her home and country as both a core and comparative concern.
Central to the artist’s life and practice has been creating environments in contrast to the poverty and civil war into which she was born; composing life within and from a variety of complex deaths. Today her home and studio are her refuge; a lush and peaceful garden of her planting and detailed care, her children alongside. Yet this personal, controlled micro-territory remains plotted within a nation highly vulnerable to ongoing exploitation of land and resources.
In search of a time and space beyond the gestural boundaries of drawing and the material limits of her medium, Maline is interested in the process of decomposition, in the verbs that alter. Using found cardboard, Maline invokes childhood memories playfully repurposing abscission and refuse. Additive marks, layered: inked, smudged, painted, sprayed. Subtractive zones, eroded contours: mined and terraced surfaces drawn with a knife and a flame. Even holes: views beyond the view.
The twelve large reliefs comprising Decomposition (Measured) are plotted on the floor with walking paths in between. Audiences can tour and inspect these gardens of information, low-tech screens, aerial surveys, microscopic studies; the geography of these reliefs reveal ruptures and scars, temperature changes, spills and leakage, clearings and remains, rare hints of new growth. Decomposition (Cut) is a series of twelve works that pose as precious wood in the form of tree slices. Upon close inspection, the anti-precious cardboard evince unlikely variations of tree rings out of synch with time – parasitic colonies attack and psychedelic growths huddle on their surfaces.
The evidentiary nature of Maline’s landscapes report warnings. She asks what can grow from today’s processes and forms of decomposition, from these complex deaths? Here and now, the artist refuses optimism. She draws us to her surfaces, to the present, where she elevates flux as fact.
About the artist | Yim Maline was born in 1982 in Battambang, and lives and works in Siem Reap, Cambodia. Her solo exhibitions include Having a hole or empty space inside, SA SA BASSAC (2015), and Silk Threads, Insider Gallery, InterContinental Hotel, Phnom Penh (2012). Select group exhibitions include ASIA NOW 2016, Paris (2016); Futurographies, Parson’s School of Design, New York, Paris; And that which was always known, Yavuz Gallery, Singapore (2015), and Eight Women, French Institute, Phnom Penh (2011). She has been awarded residencies with the Sylt Foundation, Johannesburg, South Africa and UNESCO, Andorra (2016), Vermont Studio Center, VT, USA (2015) and Bose Pacia Transparent Studio, NYC with Season of Cambodia’s IN RESIDENCE program (2013). Maline is a graduate of Phare Ponleu Selpak art school, Battambang (1995-2003) and received a BFA, Fine Art, École Supérieure des Beaux-arts de Caen la Mer, France (2010).
Artist Talk: Yim Maline
Artist Yim Maline in conversation with Curator-Writer Ben Valentine
Thursday, 27 October, 2016
5:00 – 6:00PM
Talk in Khmer with English translation
Workshop (by invitation)
Embedded South(s) – Materiality
with Zoe Butt and Gabriela Salgado
In collaboration with San Art
Saturday, 5 November, 2016
2:00 – 3:30PM
Screening (public)
Embedded South(s) – Materiality
with Zoe Butt and Gabriela Salgado
In collaboration with San Art
Saturday, 5 November, 2016
7:00 – 9:30PM
Artist Talk: Pha Lina
In collaboration with Photography Talk Series
Thursday, 24 November, 2016
6:00 – 7:00PM
Talk in Khmer with English translation
Performance + Dialogue
Performance by Yon Davy
Dialogue moderated by Chey Chankethya
In collaboration with Amrita Performing Arts
Thursday, 8 December, 2016
6:30 – 7:30PM
Event in Khmer with English translation
Kids Create!
Facilitated by artist Heak Pheary
In collaboration with Wat Ounalom children’s group
Saturday, 24 December, 2016
3:00 – 4:30PM
Workshop in Khmer
