Byline: Louisa Wright

While many visitors pass through Mondulkiri, comparatively few make the effort to venture to the neighbouring province of Ratanakiri. Cedric Delannoy’s latest exhibition aims to challenge archaic preconceptions of Ratanakiri, its people and their lifestyles.

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Cedric Delannoy’s exhibition Ratanakiri brings a unique insight into the lives of the people of the province to the hustle of Phnom Penh.

“Many people don’t know about Ratanakiri. That’s the case of almost everybody I’ve met; they went to Mondolkiri but they did not make the step forward to go to Ratanakiri. So I thought to myself, “Let’s bring Ratanakiri to Phnom Penh so they can have another view of the province,” Delannoy says.

Delannoy’s collection of black and white photographs was captured over three years, while he worked in Ratanakiri as a technical manager on a food security and nutrition project.
“I was using my camera, reports and Facebook account to document the project, so I was always [working on] it,” Delannoy says.

Delannoy found that at the end of each month he had two or three standout photographs. The result of Delannoy’s three years of photographic documentation offers a rare peek into the lives of people living in Ratanakiri and helps to break the often preconceived ideas by many who have not yet visited the province.

“I want to show that Ratanakiri has changed and is not full of nature anymore,” he says. “Many also think the people wear traditional clothes and so on. Even among the ethnic indigenous people that’s not really the case – only a few of them [wear this] now. All the young people want to wear modern clothes and even in the villages almost all of them wear The Voice Cambodia shirts.”

Woman with Pipe portrays an older Tempouan woman looking straight into the camera, puffing on a homemade pipe. The photo was taken during the final technical evaluation of Delannoy’s project. Due to the time needed to translate from the minority language to Khmer and then to English, there were often times when Delannoy could take very few photographs.

For Woman with Pipe, he simply placed his camera in front of the woman at an upwards angle. He wasn’t actually sure what he was capturing, but the result is a powerful image that has become the face of the exhibition. The handmade pipe the woman smokes is decorated with ornate pink detail, invisible in the black and white photograph.

“I did not know what I was shooting,” Delannoy says. “I just took the photo and she was looking at the camera and she was thinking, ‘What’s this?’”

Back to the Village shows an ethnic Jarai family returning home after picking fruit and vegetables. They carry the produce on their backs in backpacks called “kapas”. Traditionally the kapa is made from bamboo, but with the forest’s decline people have started to use plastic, while continuing the traditional method of construction. Delannoy hopes his exhibition can shed light on Ratanakiri and raise awareness of the help that is needed.

“There are still indigenous people, and the conditions there are very hard. In some of the photos we see sadness on the face. I think we should try to do more to help them – help people to get opportunities and to protect the landscape,” he says.

None of the subjects in Delannoy’s photographs were asked to pose or go to a certain location, and the editing process only involved minor corrections such as adjusting the contrast or cropping.

“All the pictures in the exhibition we can liken to photojournalistic reportage, because it’s really natural.”

Ratanakiri shows at Bophana Centre,
#64 St. 200 until June 16.

Transmissions, currently on show at the Bophana Centre, is a multi-disciplinary exhibition aimed at documenting the memories of Khmer Rouge survivors.

In commemoration of the 40th anniversary of the fall of Phnom Penh, Transmissions is a part of the Bophana Centre’s nine-month programme Acts of Memory.

On the walls are portraits of relatives with an image of their corresponding elder who survived the Khmer Rouge superimposed on top of them.

Each photo has a written testimony of the most significant memories the survivor had from the Khmer Rouge time. Other walls showcase photos, including many from journalist Elizabeth Becker, from the Khmer Rouge era.

A large television screen shows filmed conversations in which survivors are interviewed by students or young relatives.

“We are the younger generation and we don’t know what happened,” says Chea Sophea, Deputy Director of Bophana Centre.

Sopheap reflects on his own experiences of talking to his parents about the Khmer Rouge era to highlight the importance of the exhibition.

“They would tell you [about the Khmer Rouge] occasionally, but then the questions came and we asked, and when our questions touched them they wouldn’t answer you, because it caused tears,” Sopheap says.

However, once his parents had a few days to think about the question, they were able to answer the question and feel some release.

“It’s good to talk, to share, and then we can learn and avoid something in the future – we can move forward when we know,” Sopheap says.

A large artwork by Leang Seckon takes up half of the exhibition space. Flowering Parachute Skirt is a sculpture largely made of US-dropped bombing parachutes from air raids in Cambodia between 1965 and 1973. The figure wears a skirt made from the parachute material, which is dotted with colourful handmade flowers.

On a large table lies a scene from Rithy Panh’s film, The Missing Picture. Made from clay, the scene depicts daily life under the rule of the Khmer Rouge. Miniature clay figures sit under shelters eating, surrounded by trees and piles of corpses.

Sopheap says he likes Panh’s artistic expression, as it is difficult to ask humans to act out a situation that is so difficult to understand.
When speaking to a survivor, Sopheap says he was told he did not understand the true meaning of hunger.

“She pointed to me and said, ‘You don’t understand the meaning of hunger [under the Khmer Rouge]. You don’t understand. Now you are hungry and you can get something to eat; at that time you were just hungry.’”

Sopheap hopes the Transmissions project will not end with the close of the exhibition on March 30.

“I want the transmitting to go on, not only this year but for other years,” he said.

“One person is one memory, 100 people is 100 memories, 1000, 2000 people – then we have many, many different stories.”

Transmissions shows as part of the Acts of Memory programme until Saturday March 30 at Bophana Centre, #64 St. 200.

Heng Ravuth’s exhibition Innermost II, currently on show at Java Cafe & Gallery, is an exploration of the self and emotion. A continuation of his 2011 exhibition Innermost, Ravuth continues to use himself as the subject of his work, but he says he has added greater detail and more layers to his most recent exhibition.

Presented in mosaic form, each image is made up of small jagged square replicas of the whole image. From a distance it is near impossible to see, but look closer and you can make out the hundreds of miniature images within the painting. The canvases depict big featureless figures in various poses – Ravuth’s use of body language stands out in this exhibition. In the making of Innermost II, Ravuth used a combination of oil paint and photography.

Ravuth’s exhibition seeks to normalise nudity. Though often used in art, nudity continues to be a sensitive and uncomfortable topic in Cambodia. Ravuth says nudity is associated with shame and indignity in Cambodia, and he hopes to contribute to normalising these intimate parts of the body that can cause people to feel awkward and embarrassed. “I want to show everybody that nudity is us, and that everyone is actually nude,” he says.

In his work, Ravuth hopes to capture something a camera cannot. Instead of capturing a fleeting moment, he wants to create an atmosphere, within which feelings are encapsulated. Ravuth graduated from Phnom Penh’s Royal University of Fine Arts with a Bachelor of Fine Arts, majoring in painting, and has chosen to make self-portraiture one of his biggest focuses. His fascination with the portrait style of painting is closely associated with self-expression.

Painting mostly in hues of green, blue, purple and white, Ravuth intentionally distorts the faces and bodies that appear in his work, instead choosing to focus on conveying a feeling through his featureless figures, or attempting to give them an inner personality.

But this feeling or inner character is to be determined by the viewer. Ravuth believes there is an often unnecessary emphasis put on finding the meaning behind an artwork. Rather than telling the viewer what is happening in the picture, or explaining the personal meaning for them, he believes “mystery and curiosity can be more powerful,” and he prefers to let these traits take over: “I want to make people find the meaning behind the painting themselves; I don’t want to change people’s thinking.”

For Ravuth, another benefit of not telling the audience the meaning behind his work is getting to watch people’s reactions as they try to decipher what lies before them.

“I’m more interested in capturing emotion than having a message in my work. I’m more excited to see people’s emotion when they see my work.”

Innermost II is showing at Java Café & Gallery until Sunday April 26.

Battambang artist Sin Rithy’s latest exhibition, Undivided Nature; The Death Within Life / The Life Within Death, currently on show at Romeet gallery, is a reflection on nature, life and death; life is a blank space to be filled and death as a certain but potentially never-ending journey.

Through Rithy’s use of empty sections of wooden frames, he alludes to the idea of life being a blank space. In among the portraits of friends and acquaintances, trees, and scenes of roosters mid-cockfight, there are some frames that have been purposely left bare. Not even a canvas covers the empty half, while the other half of the frame depicts intense images of combatting cockerels.

Once a keen supporter of cockfighting, Rithy began to question his relationship with the animals he was intentionally putting in harm’s way.

“If I’m like this, I use my life in a bad way. Before I thought about getting money, but to make another life feel pain, to make myself happy but to make another life unhappy, I think it is not good for living.”

Recognising the similarities between the lives of humans and other animals, Rithy says that they are essentially identical aside from the actions of the animal itself. He recognises that as sentient beings, humans have the ability to make active choices and give their lives meaning.

“Our lives are the same, but if I still have the action of the chicken – so my life is the same as the chicken – in this situation until I die, my life doesn’t have anything. It’s a waste of time.”

Before Rithy attempted to understand the animal and consider how it might feel to have someone try to ultimately destroy you – cockfighting often results in death or serious injury to the birds – he had little difficulty killing animals, chickens in particular. But since his realisation that the life of an animal is not so different to that of a human he has found it hard to go through with it.

“Before I was strong enough to kill the animal, especially the chicken. But now I feel pity, I’m not strong enough, and maybe I cannot. It’s not easy for me. When I look back into the past, I feel terrible about what I did before.”

A student of Phare Ponleu Selpak, Rithy seems to have branched out from his portraiture style and delved into works that depict a vivid representation of the animals he has found a way to relate to through the value of life.

Rithy’s exhibition literally comes to life in the form of his live painting. To the beat of Khmer boxing music, Rithy paints an image from the perspective of a rooster during a cockfight.

The live painting sessions are dramatic and Rithy often throws paint at the canvas. “This is the shirt I always use for live painting,” he says, unbuttoning the first few buttons of his long sleeved shirt to reveal a paint-spattered white top.

Although Rithy’s paintings are captivating enough in themselves, he feels his live painting sessions add an exciting element to his exhibitions.

“I have to do something to make [people] remember me forever.”

Artist Kim Hak explores the phenomenon of memory in his most recent exhibitions throughout the city.

Memory: a recollection of the past; the faculty by which the mind stores and remembers information; the length of time over which a person or event continues to be remembered; the theme of artist Kim Hak’s work.

Hak currently has multiple exhibitions on display, both centering on memory. Alive, showing at the French Institute, involves an array of objects used during the Khmer Rouge regime – an old army canteen that belonged to his father; a metal breakfast bowl still used every morning by the owner today – to unearth the memories of those who survived the rule, the 40-year anniversary of which falls on April 17 this year.

The other, showing at Java Cafe & Gallery, titled Unity, is an intimate portrayal of a country coming together to grieve and remember King Sihanouk, who died on October 15, 2012. Instead of focusing on the ceremony taking place, Hak turned his camera to the people and captured their moments of reflection.

Hak hasn’t had any formal photography training. When he finished high school in 1998, studying photography wasn’t even an option – no courses were available. He remembers the exact happenings that sparked his desire to become a photographer.

In 1990, when moving from one house in Phnom Penh to another, the chaos that comes with packing uncovered an old box of black and white family photos. He spent all night sifting through the photographs and looking at the faces they had encapsulated. Hak would have been 9 or 10 years old at the time, and he remembers realising the link between photography and memory.

When speaking with the owners of the items he photographed for Alive, Hak expected the conversations to be painful and hard, but he found the tone to be bittersweet. A kettle was the inspiration for the exhibition. It has been in Kim’s family since before the time of the Khmer Rouge. It is old and worn but his mother still uses it every day. Hak said she laughed as she talked about the kettle’s history. During the regime his father became very ill and his mother cooked a chicken in the kettle for him to help build his strength. At the time, people were not allowed to eat such luxurious food items, and his father was so afraid of being found out that he didn’t dare eat it.

“I learned that, for them, it is kind of bittersweet. It’s bitter, but it’s sweet that they still remember. They’re lucky they survived and can still share with us,” Hak said.

The most difficult part of Hak’s Alive project is finding the objects; not much remains from before the Khmer Rouge regime. By April 17, he hopes to have 40 images to correlate with the 40-year anniversary. The exhibition is presented in a timeline, but there is a certain element missing: the people who fled to the borders and made their way to different countries. Hak hopes to make contact with some of these people and discover the precious objects they took with them.

It has now been almost 40 years since the Khmer Rouge rule, and Hak points out that some of the survivors have already died. He hopes to publish a photo book to commemorate the Khmer Rouge survivors and their memories.

“My idea is to let the objects dig out the memory and then document it and write it down. Maybe publish a photo book so the information and the memory will be alive, so it can be passed from the old people to the young generation.”