The 17th April 2025 marks 50 years since ‘Day One’ when Phnom Penh fell to the Khmer Rouge who took power and marked the beginning of a genocide that saw the deaths of over 2 million people.
This exhibition brings together three artists and their work reflecting on the experiences of Cambodia during the genocide and after, in reclaiming identities, creating new lives and accepting the past.
The exhibition will be on display from 31st March to 4th April, 10am – 5pm with a launch event where each artist will present their work. Please sign up to attend here.
Dayanny So
Dayanny So’s artistic practice is deeply rooted in a Cambodian upbringing and the unexpected journey that brought the artist to the UK as a young adult. Drawing inspiration from a rich tapestry of experiences, memories, and cultural influences, includes the complexities of displacement that are often overlooked in understanding the post-genocide experience.
Exploring the dynamic and entwined popular cultures of East and West through fine art practice, central themes often carry the significance of his birthplace. Music, classical Khmer sculptures, artisan handcrafts, national identity and textiles address the social and political issues of Cambodia’s turbulent past. The personal struggles as an immigrant, form layers of familiar imagery and narratives within conceptual installations.
The traditional and tactile craftmanship evident in the work holds profound meaning for him. As a child, he spent countless hours making toys and objects for myself. This experience shapes an artistic process that involves diverse media and making activities. Despite the variation, recurrent thematic concerns, the associations of chosen textiles and a consistent practice-based research methodology provide a sense of formal coherence.
Dayanny’s investigative creative journey is characterized by the continuous flow of ideas and interests. Each body of work emerges from feeding the previous one, the subject matter dictating its materials and form of expression. From this developmental progression, an evolving body of work reflects the way experiential artworks arise out at the intersections of cultures and identities.
Dayanny So, is a Cambodian diaspora artist, who draws upon his personal experiences of surviving the Khmer Rouge regime to create powerful and evocative artwork.
Charles Fox
‘Hidden’ is a result of a long-term collaboration between Charles Fox and Prum Sisaphantha (Pantha) and the journey she made through the Khmer Rouge (1975 -1979) landscape carrying over 90 family photographs as negatives.
Through a dialog, with work only emerging in recent years, the book and its display attempts to articulate both the journey and the narrative of Pantha, it exists as an artifact which has been part prompt in the dialog, and a continued site of production and representation of the journey.
The hand made book is over 9 meters in length, when displayed the book unfolds along a line which was created by a GPS recording of the recreation of the journey. During this recreation Pantha wrote of her experience during the Khmer Rouge. The writing in Khmer has been translated into English.
The landscape photographs are Fox’s response to the landscape of Pantha’s journey.
The book cloth is a replication of the fabric bag the negatives were carried in during the Khmer Rouge strapped to Pantha’s body.
As the photographs were hidden during the Khmer Rouge the book contains writing on the family photographs rather than showing them directly, this is in reference the invisibility of the family photograph during this period. To hold such photographs might have been considered as evidence of being a member of the urban elite and result in punishment or death at the hands of the Khmer Rouge.
Charles Fox is a photographer and practice-based researcher working with a focus on visual methodologies and collaborative community-based practice. Splitting his time between the UK and South East Asia, Charles has worked in Cambodia since 2006.
Komarine Romdenh-Romluc
Thread tells the story of a journey to Cambodia. It both represents Kom’s ongoing search to make sense of her Cambodian heritage, and is the record of a literal journey to the country with her father and brother to introduce her daughter and niece to the family in November 2022. It turned out to be her father’s last voyage back to his homeland.
Kom’s father came to the UK in 1977. Despite living and working in mainland Europe for many years before then, the political turmoil in Cambodia rendered him sans papiers, and he arrived in England as a refugee. Believing that his family had been murdered by Pol Pot’s regime, he cut all ties with Cambodia, refusing to speak Khmer for so long that he forgot his native tongue. In fact, nearly all his siblings survived. Kom traced them on the internet in 2007, and the family were reunited in person the same year.
This piece is composed of chewed and filtered auditory fragments representing the fragile threads that bind people across time and distance: radio connections to the country and the Cambodian diaspora; traditional Cambodian music; Khmer hip hop; dance music; psychedelic rock from Cambodia’s swinging sixties; the FSI (Foreign Services Institute) language pack created around 1969 for US government personnel working in Cambodia, which Kom’s brother used in his first attempts to learn Khmer; and Kom’s field recordings from the trip in November 2022, during Bon Om Teuk – the Water Festival – when people celebrate the end of the rainy season and the reversal of the Tonle Sap’s flow. The Buddhist ceremony of Sampeah Preah Khe occurs at the end of Bom Om Teuk. Many Cambodians visit temples throughout this time.
Komarine Romdenh-Romluc is an academic and DJ. Her fundamental interest is in who we are. She works within the phenomenological tradition in philosophy, and uses its resources to understand our bodily existence, and the ways we are shaped by the surrounding world. She is particularly interested in questions of diaspora identity and what it is to belong. As a DJ, Kom has performed at various club nights and festivals across the UK and in France. She has also created radio shows for Melodic Distraction (Liverpool UK), Hanoi Community Radio (Vietnam), Hong Kong Community Radio (Hong Kong), 5;8: radio (Moscow, Russia), Ujima Radio (Bristol UK), and Mondo Radio (Sheffield UK) where she previously held a monthly residency.