STUDIO
The shared studio of Vong Phaophanit and Claire Oboussier is based in London and has evolved over 25 years from a creative dialogue that began in the mid-1980s. It is an evolving ecology in which thinking, making, writing, drawing and exchange continually inform one another, allowing works to emerge across sculpture, installation, drawing, printmaking, photographic work, moving image and public commissions.
Within the studio, material, language and image remain in continual exchange. Ideas develop through the slow accumulation of drawing, writing, making and experimentation, allowing individual works to evolve over extended periods and across different media. The studio sustains both collaborative commissions and slower, more reflective forms of enquiry, each informing and renewing the other.
Recurring concerns within the practice include dislocation, memory and deterritorialisation, together with forms of meaning-making that exceed national, cultural and social borders. These concerns are approached through material enquiry, allowing meaning to emerge through the relationships between material, language, image, space and perception.
Phaophanit and Oboussier’s work is held in public and private collections internationally and encompasses major installations and sculptural works, drawings, prints, photographic work, films, books and socially engaged public commissions. They continue to collaborate with architects, engineers, musicians, choreographers and other specialists on projects realised across museum, gallery and public contexts.
COLLABORATIVE PRACTICE
Today Phaophanit and Oboussier work as a collaborative practice whose work encompasses sculpture, installation, drawing, printmaking, photographic work, moving image, books and socially engaged public commissions. Recurring concerns include language, memory, deterritorialisation and forms of meaning-making that exceed national, cultural and social borders.
During the early 1990s, while Phaophanit’s international exhibition career gathered momentum, including a Turner Prize nomination and participation in the Venice Biennale in 1993, Oboussier was awarded the Dyment and Thomas Scholarship for doctoral research in the arts and humanities, completing her PhD at the University of Bristol in 1994. The late 1990s marked an important development in their creative partnership following their relocation to Berlin during Phaophanit’s DAAD Fellowship. During this period they produced the co-authored artist book Atopia (Berliner Künstlerprogramm DAAD, 2003), an early material expression of the collaboration, in response to the city’s changing cultural, political and physical landscape. Around the same time they created the video work All that’s solid melts into air (Karl Marx) (Tate Collection) as part of The Quiet in the Land, a pioneering transnational arts project in Luang Prabang, Lao PDR. The work explores the precariousness of language and memory and the role they play in constructing both national and personal identities, engaging with the “instability and ephemerality of meaning, its fluctuation across time and languages.”*
Phaophanit and Oboussier have produced a number of groundbreaking public commissions including ‘Outhouse’ (2004) for Liverpool Housing Action Trust, a sculptural glass ‘abode’ sited within a public park for the collective use of local residents. In 2008 they were selected for the Channel 4 Big Art Project for which they proposed ‘Northern Light’ – a suspended architectural work for North Belfast, ‘a ‘third space’ beyond polarised territories’, again conceived for the collective use of local communities. Other key works in public space include neon installations such as ‘Topography of Dreams’ (2007), Curzon Street Station, Birmingham, ‘Light Curtain’ for Hull Truck Theatre (2009), ‘Light of Day’ (2010) for the Neo-Natal Baby Unit at St Georges Hospital in London and ‘Coronium’ (2011) for Kilden, the New Performing Arts Centre in Kristiansand, Norway. In 2012, as part of the cultural Olympiad, they were commissioned to make ‘Light Veils’, a permanent laser installation for Weymouth Seafront and a legacy work for the town.
‘Mute Meadow’ was inaugurated in 2011 on the banks of the River Foyle in Derry~Londonderry, Northern Ireland – a major socially engaged public work commissioned as part of the ‘post-conflict’ re-imagining of the city. In 2015 they installed ‘Dream House’, a public sculpture commission for downtown Toronto that explores diasporic notions of home and belonging. In the same year they were commissioned by the Wellcome Trust to produce ‘IT IS AS IF’, an immersive video installation which launched at at Block 336 Gallery in Brixton, South London. The work is an experimental collaboration between the artists and surgeon Professor Roger Kneebone (Imperial College, London), investigating the unspoken languages of medical surgery and extending their commitment to engaged practice, inter-diciplinary dialogue and their interest in non-narrative, trans-cultural forms of meaning.
In 2017 Phaophanit and Oboussier participated in the ground-breaking Diaspora Pavilion at Venice Biennale and served as mentors for artist Erika Tan.
More recent projects include ‘In Other Words’ (2018), a permanent commission for Cambridge University in collaboration with Eric Parry Architects; ‘The Call of Things’ (2018) a permanent video installation for Fen Court in the City of London; the Diaspora Pavilion, Venice Biennale 2017 (International Curators Forum); Thailand Biennale 2018; and Singapore Biennale 2019. In 2021, ‘Borderless’, a hand-carved stone work for the facade of the new Cleveland Clinic in London, was unveiled. Phaophanit’s early work ‘Neon Rice Field’ (1993, Tate Collection) was on display throughout 2023 at Tate Britain as part of the re-hang of the gallery’s permanent collection.
Phaophanit and Oboussier have exhibited at venues such as Tate Britain, National Gallery Singapore, Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin, National Gallery of Canada, Ottowa, IMMA, Dublin, Reina Sofia Museum, Madrid, Iziko National Gallery, Cape Town, South Africa, the Shanghai Biennale, International Short Film Festival Oberhausen and Void Gallery, Derry~Londonderry. The duo are regularly invited to speak at venues including Tate Britain, The Royal Academy, The Imperial War Museum, The Royal Society of Arts, and Cooper Union, OCAD, Toronto. They frequently collaborate with leading architects, engineers, musicians and choreographers including: Eric Parry Architects, Hopkins Architects, Wilkinson Eyre, Architects Alliance, Wright and Wright, John McAslan and Partners, Dewhurst Macfarlane and Partners, Grimshaw Architects, Price & Myers, PLP Architecture, Ushida Findlay, Gensler, Savanh Phaophanit and Rosemary Butcher.
*(Tate Gallery exhibition text, 2008)