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Cambodia: The Memory Workshop
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Columbia News featured a video about this art exhibit, which was displayed at the Maison Française and Italian Academy April 10-May 4, 2013.

The video includes interviews with the artists, curators and others involved in this project, as well as footage of the exhibits and exhibit opening events. To read more about the Memory Workshop art exhibit, please click here.

Cambodia: The Memory Workshop, curated by Soko-Phay Vakalis and Pierre Bayard, is part of the city-wide Season of Cambodia festival and features seventy works of visual arts (paintings, drawings, photographs) made by the great contemporary artists Vann Nath and Séra (both survivors of the genocide), as well as works by emerging artists who were invited to create artworks evoking the genocide during three "memory workshops" held between 2008 and 2012. This exhibit highlights the dynamism and the strength of creation of three generations of Cambodian artists. The diversity and the polysemy of their artworks testify also to the passage from I to we, from an intimate way of living and thinking to a collective consciousness.

 

 
The Flowering Parachute Skirt: Gathering and Procession
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On May 1, 2013, a parachute from the Vietnam War, transformed by Cambodian artist Leang Seckon into an emblem of reconciliation, was the centerpiece of a public peace gathering and procession at Columbia University involving Vietnamese and Cambodian survivors of that war as well as U.S. veterans.

The gathering helped inspire an article about the Season of Cambodia festival published on the site, Blouin Artinfo. To read the article, please follow the link below:

Season of Cambodia Festival Explores Themes of Forgiveness and Renewal

Additional photos taken at the event can be viewed on our Facebook page.

Official Press Release:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

The Flowering Parachute Skirt: Gathering and Procession

At the Maison Française, Columbia University, Buell Hall (on lawn east of Buell)

Wednesday, May 1, 2013, 5 p.m.

CONTACT: Shanny Peer, Director of Columbia's Maison Française; 212-854-4482; This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

NEW YORK, April 26, 2013 – A parachute from the Vietnam War, transformed by Cambodian artist Leang Seckon into an emblem of reconciliation, will be the centerpiece of a public peace gathering involving Vietnamese and Cambodian survivors of that war as well as U.S. veterans at Columbia University on May 1 at 5 p.m. The event will take place at 5 p.m. on the lawn outside Buell Hall and is open to the public.

The parachute, which fell to earth in Seckon’s village during the U.S. bombing of Cambodia, has been repurposed into a moveable sculpture, Flowering Parachute Skirt, and decorated with flowers cut from sarongs from his home village as well as from fabrics given by the Cambodian-American community in the Bronx – turning it into the skirt of a fantastical soldier figure.

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