June 6th 2018

ZHENG MAHLER

Royce Ng and Daisy Bisenieks

Artist collective, Hong Kong

Zheng Mahler are an artist (Royce Ng) and anthropologist (Daisy Bisenieks) duo working together on research intensive, community based, site-specific projects often utilising digital media, performances and installation to explore relationships between art and research practice. Drawing from each other’s respective backgrounds, they examine the limits as well as the methods and strategies of expanding both their familiar disciplines while experimenting with new interdisciplinary possibilities or cross pollinations, where anthropological approaches are applied to art practice and artistic methodologies are utilised as research exercises in the studies of anthropology. The lecture was held in english.

Zheng Mahler will approach the topic of working with the camera at the interface between art and ethnography by constructing completely virtual ethnographic spaces in Deep Water (2017) where the lens is in fact a completely de-materialized digital one as a possibility for transcending the art/science, reality/fiction dichotomies. In Debt and the Making of the Khmer Working Class (2017) Zheng Mahler want to suggest how using 360 degree cameras as perhaps an ideal medium suited to over coming the colonial power dynamics of ethnography by a) Giving greater agency to the viewer by making them BECOME the camera itself, and b) Disembodying the viewer by literally putting them into the POV of the ’subject‘ of the film.