Dany Pen | |
|---|---|
 Dany Pen at the Bermuda National Gallery advocating for Early Years Art Education, October 25, 2017. |
Dany Pen (born September 22, 1986) is a Khmer-Canadian human rights activist, artist and educator.
Dany Pen | |
|---|---|
| Dany Pen at the Bermuda National Gallery advocating for Early Years Art Education, October 25, 2017. |
Dany Pen (born September 22, 1986) is a Khmer-Canadian human rights activist, artist and educator.
Dany Pen was born to a Cambodian refugee family who arrived in America in the 1980s. [1] She spent the first few years of her childhood living in Toronto, Ontario, Canada under the sanctuary of the Catholic Church with her mother. In the late 1980s, Pen and her mother were transitioned into the community of St. Jamestown by the Toronto Housing Corporation. In 1995, Pen and her mother were relocated again to the housing projects of Regent Park. [2]
At the age of 12, Pen was nominated by her school for the Toronto Star Honderich Award. The submission of her essay "Pride in the Ghetto" granted her the award and a full academic scholarship from the University of Toronto.
Pen began using art as a platform for her political and social agendas. She then decided to transfer her University of Toronto scholarship to attend OCAD University. She completed her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree at OCAD in sculpture and installation and was honoured with the "Faculty Chair" award upon graduation. [3]
After graduating from OCAD, Pen had her first solo art show at The Board of Directors in Toronto. [3]
The spotlight gave her the opportunity to also showcase her work at XPACE Gallery [4] in conjunction with the CONTACT Photography Festival [5] in Canada and a solo show at the Society of Arts in Bermuda. [6]
Her art show titled "Deja Vu 1965" [6] in Bermuda caught the attention of art critic Charles Zuill, who compared her works to that of Post-Impressionist Artist Paul Gauguin. [7]
Her artwork Erasures, influenced by the history of the Cambodian genocide and the Khmer Rouge regime, was featured in the 2012 Bermuda Biennial. [8] [9]
Her artwork Grooming Goods, which spoke to slavery and consumerism, was selected and featured in the 2014 International Bermuda Biennial. [10] [11] [12]
Her Self-Portrait and Family artwork series, which also comments on her family history with the Cambodian genocide, were featured in the 2015 Charman exhibition at the Museum of Masterworks. She was also previously awarded the 2013 Charman Prize for artist with "Best Source of Inspiration". [13] [14]
Her artwork Last Breath featured in the 2016 Bermuda Biennial. [15] [16] [17]
In 2006, Pen became involved with June Callwood Centre (formerly known as Jessie's Centre) and began advocating for the rights of young mothers and the protection of young girls from sexual abuse. The same year, Pen explicitly spoke out for women's rights and addressed the North York Community Council; the City of Toronto government, and the City of North York to provide adequate housing to young single mothers in the city of Toronto and North York. Her advocacy was challenged by the Bayview community, however the number of vote by city councilors resulted in the approval of the building permits.
In 2016, Pen was appointed to serve on the Human Rights Commission as a Commissioner in Bermuda. [18] [19] As the Human Rights Commissioner, Pen held special interests in women's rights, gender equality and education. [19]
The same year in 2016, Pen founded the international advocacy group called Women's A.C.T (action, change, today). The Women's A.C.T organization is about equality, justice, empowerment and support for women who are survivors of sexual assault, violence and domestic abuse. [20]
Notably and controversially, on April 9, 2021 VICE Media Group published an article titled, “These People Were Arrested by the Khmer Rouge and Never Seen Again,” featuring photos of Tuol Sleng victims with their faces manipulated — erased and subjectively colorized — by Matt Loughrey, a “self-taught artist”. The photos however, have been used without the community’s consent including many of the surviving family members of those murdered at the Tuol Sleng execution site. Dany Pen along with other members of the Cambodian community launch an international petition demanding that Matt Loughrey and Vice Media Group issue an apology to the Cambodian Community. The petition amassed over 10,000 signatures world wide with press releases in the New York Times, [21] Washington Post, [22] BBC News [23] and Southeast Asian Globe [24] publications. The petition received world wide support and even direct support from the Kingdom of Cambodia who released their own international public statement. [25] Pen and Vice Media Group were able to reconcile the situation through private meetings in which Vice media group thereafter issued a public and private apology. [26]
In 2006, Pen was recognized by the City of Toronto government and former Mayor David Miller for her philanthropic work and advocacy for women's rights.
In 2016, Pen was honored with the "World Builder" award from OCAD University, Canada, which is the highest honors for alumni achievement. [27] [28] [29] The "World Builder" award is bestowed upon individuals who have made substantive humanitarian contributions to their community and culture; individuals who are active in supporting global causes. [30]
In 2017, Pen was nominated as "Woman of the Year" in Bermuda at the Women's Empowerment Summit hosted by Today in Bermuda. Pen was recognized for her on-going advocacy for women's rights.
The Khmer Rouge is the name that was popularly given to members of the Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK) and by extension to the regime through which the CPK ruled Cambodia between 1975 and 1979. The name was coined in the 1960s by then Prime Minister Norodom Sihanouk to describe his country's heterogeneous, communist-led dissidents, with whom he allied after his 1970 overthrow.
Phnom Penh is the capital and most populous city of Cambodia. It has been the national capital since the French protectorate of Cambodia, and has grown to become the nation's economic, industrial, and cultural centre.
Choeung Ek is the site of a former orchard and mass grave of victims of the Khmer Rouge – killed between 1975 and 1979 – in Dangkao Section, Phnom Penh, Cambodia, about 17 kilometres (11 mi) south of the Phnom Penh city centre. It is the best-known of the sites known as The Killing Fields, where the Khmer Rouge regime executed over one million people between 1975 and 1979.
The Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum or simply Tuol Sleng is a museum chronicling the Cambodian genocide. Located in Phnom Penh, the site is a former secondary school which was used as Security Prison 21 by the Khmer Rouge regime from 1975 until its fall in 1979. From 1976 to 1979, an estimated 20,000 people were imprisoned at Tuol Sleng and it was one of between 150 and 196 torture and execution centers established by the Khmer Rouge. On 26 July 2010, the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia convicted the prison's chief, Kang Kek Iew, for crimes against humanity and grave breaches of the 1949 Geneva Conventions. He died on 2 September 2020 while serving a life sentence.
Kang Kek Iew, also spelled Kaing Guek Eav, nom de guerreComrade Duch or Hang Pin, was a Cambodian convicted war criminal and leader in the Khmer Rouge movement, which ruled Democratic Kampuchea from 1975 to 1979. As the head of the government's internal security branch (Santebal), he oversaw the Tuol Sleng (S-21) prison camp where thousands were held for interrogation and torture, after which the vast majority of these prisoners were eventually executed.
Son Sen, alias Comrade Khieu (សមមិត្តខៀវ) or "Brother Number 89", was a Cambodian Communist politician and soldier. A member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Kampuchea/Party of Democratic Kampuchea, the Khmer Rouge, from 1974 to 1992, Sen oversaw the Party's security apparatus, including the Santebal secret police and the notorious security prison S-21 at Tuol Sleng.
The Killing Fields are a number of sites in Cambodia where collectively more than a million people were killed and buried by the Khmer Rouge regime during its rule of the country from 1975 to 1979, immediately after the end of the Cambodian Civil War (1970–1975). The mass killings are widely regarded as part of a broad state-sponsored genocide.
Nuon Chea, also known as Long Bunruot or Rungloet Laodi, was a Cambodian communist politician and revolutionary who was the chief ideologist of the Khmer Rouge. He also briefly served as acting Prime Minister of Democratic Kampuchea. He was commonly known as "Brother Number Two", as he was second-in-command to Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot, General Secretary of the Party, during the Cambodian genocide of 1975–1979. In 2014, Nuon Chea received a life sentence for crimes against humanity, alongside another top-tier Khmer Rouge leader, Khieu Samphan, and a further trial convicted him of genocide in 2018. These life sentences were merged into a single life sentence by the Trial Chamber on 16 November 2018. He died while serving his sentence in 2019.
François Bizot is a French anthropologist, the only Westerner to have survived imprisonment by the Khmer Rouge.
Kampuchea, officially from 5 January 1976 Democratic Kampuchea, was a Cambodian state under a one-party Marxist-Leninist totalitarian dictatorship that existed between 1975 and 1979. It was controlled by the Khmer Rouge (KR), the name popularly given to the followers of the Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK), and was founded when KR forces defeated the Khmer Republic of Lon Nol in 1975.
Vann Nath was a Cambodian painter, artist, writer, and human rights activist. He was the eighth Cambodian to win the Lillian Hellman/Hammett Award since 1995. He was one of only seven known adult survivors of S-21 camp, where 20,000 Cambodians were tortured and executed during the Khmer Rouge regime.
S-21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine is a 2003 documentary film directed by Rithy Panh. Rithy, himself a survivor of the Khmer Rouge, brought together two former prisoners of the regime with their former captors at Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, the former Security Prison 21 (S-21) under the Khmer Rouge.
Chum Mey is one of only seven known adult survivors of the Khmer Rouge imprisonment in the S-21 Tuol Sleng camp, where 20,000 prisoners, mostly Cambodians, were sent for execution. Formerly a motor mechanic working in Phnom Penh, he was taken to the prison on 28 October 1978, accused of being a spy. His life was only spared because of his ability to repair sewing machines for Pol Pot's soldiers. In 2004, he described the killing of his wife and son:
"First they shot my wife, who was marching in front with the other women," he said. "She screamed to me, 'Please run, they are killing me now'. I heard my son crying and then they fired again, killing him. When I sleep, I still see their faces, and every day I still think of them".
The Royal Government of the National Union of Kampuchea was a government-in-exile of Cambodia, based in Beijing, that was in existence between 1970 and 1976, and was briefly in control of the country starting in 1975.
Reach Sambath was a Cambodian journalist and a former spokesperson and Chief of Public Affairs of the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC), commonly known as the Khmer Rouge Tribunal, set up to try the most senior Khmer Rouge leaders from 1975 to 1979. Sambath had a master's degree in journalism from Columbia University, New York, and a career as a university lecturer at the Royal University of Phnom Penh and a reporter in Cambodia with Agence France-Presse since the 1990s.
Stuart Robert Glass was a Canadian adventurer and yachtsman killed by the Khmer Rouge in August 1978 while sailing a little yacht named "Foxy Lady" through Cambodian waters. One of nine "Western" yachtsmen known to have been seized by the Democratic Kampuchean regime, between April and November 1978. He was the sole Canadian victim of the 1975–79 Cambodian genocide.
Theary Chan Seng is a Cambodian-American human-rights activist and lawyer, the former executive director of the Centre for Social Development, and president of the Center for Cambodian Civic Education. She is the author of Daughter of the Killing Fields, a book about her experiences as a child during the Khmer Rouge regime.
The Cambodian genocide was the systematic persecution and killing of Cambodians by the Khmer Rouge under the leadership of Communist Party of Kampuchea general secretary Pol Pot, who radically pushed Cambodia towards an entirely self-sufficient agrarian socialist society. It resulted in the deaths of 1.5 to 2 million people from 1975 to 1979, nearly a quarter of Cambodia's 1975 population.
Khun Srun was an important Cambodian writer. He was born in Char village (ភូមិចារ), Rorvieng sub-district (ឃុំរវៀង), Samrong district (ស្រុកសំរោង), Takéo province, into a poor Chinese Cambodian family. When he was eight, his father, Khun Kim Chheng, a Chinese man who had fled Communism, died, and he and his six siblings were raised by his mother, Chi Eng, a small shopkeeper and a devout Buddhist. He began his schooling during the country's first years of independence, when the doors to higher education and professionalization were inching open to all Cambodians, regardless of their social and economic class. A brilliant student, he studied Khmer literature and psychology at the university in Phnom Penh, becoming widely read in the sciences, mathematics, and European literature. Amid the turmoil of the 1960s, he worked as a professor of mathematics and a journalist while writing fiction and poetry. He also worked as a member of the textbook editorial committee at the Ministry of Education. In less than four years, he published three collections of poems, short tales, and philosophical anecdotes; two collections of autobiographical short stories, The Last Residence and The Accused; and a final volume of poems, For a Woman. He was influenced by both existentialism and Cambodian Buddhism. In 1971, he was imprisoned during 7 months by the right-wing Lon Nol government for refusing to collaborate, but still refused to align himself with the extreme left. In 1973, after being imprisoned for a second time, he finally joined the communist guerrillas. He was only 28, and his life as a writer was finished. After the Khmer Rouge took power, in 1975, Khun Srun was assigned work as a railway engineer). On the 20th of December 1978, he, his wife and their two youngest children were victims of the last purges. They were arrested, transferred to Tuol Sleng prison and probably killed in Choeung Ek, few days before the end of Pol Pot's regime. Only Khun Srun's nine-year-old daughter, Khun Khem, survived, taken by the Khmer Rouge and forced to live among them in the forest on the Cambodian-Thai border.
Linda Saphan is a Cambodian artist and social anthropologist. Born in Phnom Penh, she grew up in Canada and graduated in France. She has supported women artists from Cambodia, co-organizing the first Visual Arts Open festival celebrating Cambodian artists in 2005. Her recent art work had included textiles and embroidery. As an academic, she is currently Assistant Professor of Sociology at Paris Nanterre University.