Suturing Worlds

Open Workshop: « Suturing Worlds »
Adeena Mey and Han Mengyun @han_mengyun at Akademie der bildenden Künste Wien, June 9th 10-15.

This workshop brings together artist Han Mengyun and researcher Adeena Mey for a day of shared viewing, discussion, and collective thinking around questions of healing, memory, and the politics of knowledge. The day opens with a screening and presentation of Han Mengyun’s three-channel video installation Night Sutra @night_sutra_ (premiered at the Busan Biennale 2024), followed by a conversation with the artist. The work intertwines tales of genocide, exile, healing, and rebellion with reflections on transcultural and intergenerational womanhood, motherhood, postpartum depression, and the often-overlooked misogyny within Buddhist traditions through recorded episodes of her Lacanian psychoanalytic sessions. Emulating the format of Buddhist sutras, the film integrates woodblock-printed motifs while stitching and binding a variety of narrative forms. The moving image shifts between Buddhist verses, oral testimonies from Khmer Rouge survivors, Cambodian classical dance, and the artist’s performances, where the distinct voices of the female subjects are centralised.

Intersecting with and expanding on some of the issues explored in Night Sutra, Adeena Mey’s talk examines Korean artist Im-Heung Soon’s film ‘Factory Complex’ underscoring how the film reveals transnational dimensions of labour exploitation, linking struggles of South Korean and Cambodian women workers. Resisting Western-centric narratives, the film is read granting agency to marginalised voices. Read in dialogue with artist Dinh Q Lê’s ‘The Texture of Memory’, through their shared engagement with violence exerted on women and their reception in psychiatric terms, Mey’s talk will deconstruct the latter’s epistemological basis as founded on western, patriarchal medical knowledge, highlighting artistic and non-western approaches to healing.