Svay Sareth (born 1972, Battambang, Cambodia / lives and works Siem Reap) holds a Diplôme National Supérieur d’Études des Arts Plastiques, University of Caen, Normandy (2009). Notable group exhibitions include 10th Asia Pacific Triennial, Biennale of Sydney, Gwangju Biennale, and Singapore Biennale. He won the Prudential Eye Award’s Best Emerging Artist Award in 2016. As a co-founder of Phare Ponleu Selepak (1994) and    co-founded with Yim Maline of Blue Art Center(2018),  Svay Sareth’s multidisciplinary practice is rooted in an autobiography of resistance. As a child survivor of genocide in Cambodia and former refugee on the Thai-Cambodian border until young adulthood, Sareth believes personal and collective memory and its formation as official history require constant confrontation in the ongoing present. Tempering strength with futility and survival with adventure, Sareth’s work is layered and complex with desires for freedom and catharsis.  Using his body as a medium to question order and authority, Sareth’s durational performance practice is public and interventional by nature, requiring high levels of physical and mental endurance.

For Mon Boulet (2011), meaning “my burden”, Sareth journeyed six days, pulling a cumbersome, two-meter-wide, 80-kilogram reflective metal sphere 250 kilometers from the ancient to present-day capital of Cambodia, carrying with him a few basic amenities associated with refugee migrations worldwide. In his highly-crafted, ongoing soft-sculpture series, Ruins, camouflaged and cartoonish figures are carefully sewn into different roles. While some are monumental in scale and challenge Buddhist moral teaching, others pile on the floor referencing looted Khmer stone statuary, and others, like the installation Yell and Silent (2018), are autobiographical. The readymade is also a significant part of Sareth’s practice. Stake or Skewer combines seventeen black rubber sandals on a bamboo carrying pole, symbolic of the number of years he spent in labor and refugee camps. For a corresponding work, Eat (both 2015), the artist programmed a scrolling LED sign in red font the seventeen words for “eat” in Khmer language based on historical and hierarchical connections between class, education, and rights of speech.