Born into the recovery period after the fall of the Khmer Rouge, Vandy Rattana found himself perturbed by the loss of personal snapshots, journals, and other keepsakes documenting the lives of Cambodians—their hardship and endurance. A self-taught photojournalist and artist, Rattana has made it his personal mission to capture uneasy images of quotidian life, including man-made and natural disasters, to provide an alternative to the tranquil images of Cambodia disseminated by the tourist industry. In “Postcards from Home,” Rattana’s first solo show in Phnom Penh in more than a decade, he displayed hundreds of images spanning his early career as a photojournalist, from 2004 to 2010, on cheap newsprint. While the photographs highlighted events of great sociopolitical importance in Cambodia, the installation’s function was psychosomatic as well as archival: As viewers transitioned between its two rooms, one lit and one darkened, they experienced not only a multitude of tactile fragments from Cambodia’s photographic annals but also a distorted sense of nonchronological time space.
On the walls of the exhibition’s front room, Rattana collaged variously sized images capturing a wide span of sites and periods and depicting subjects ranging from tourists swarming in front of the temples at Angkor Wat to tense-faced Khmer Rouge leaders on trial. While the images touch on prominent themes in Cambodia’s modern history, the superimposed composition evaded linearity, warding off any attempt at thorough exposure or comprehensive transparency. Crossing through a plastic curtain, visitors entered a larger, unlit room where Rattana’s obsessive documentation of Cambodia spiraled into a sprawl of images, covering the walls like termites. The only way to view these images was with a cell phone’s flashlight, yet even that proved challenging: Rattana had placed his photographs inside plastic covers. When one image was illuminated, its reflective cocoon diffracted the phone’s light and rendered neighboring images illegible. This futile struggle for visibility, coupled with the room’s eerie atmosphere––somewhere between a studio darkroom and an interrogation chamber—entreated us to question not only our sensorial perception, but also the images’ validity as records of the past.
Two opposing impulses were perpetually at play within this tenebrous space. One was the artist’s penchant for overproducing images; the room seemed like a photographic womb, where images were being birthed in great quantity, forming history while canceling each other’s presence. As the constellations of eclectic pictures conveyed both the tragic and quotidian components of a nation’s history, we could see how repetition renders monumental historical events banal. Looking at these images, one could not distinguish between past, present, and future––it all became a genuine yet unnerving chaos.
The show also evinced the artist’s proclivity for photographs charged with a deductive propensity toward narrative: The image-filled walls gestured toward the aesthetics of a detective board. As we attempt to grasp one symbol while others slip away from view, the heavy tension between our compulsive desire for factual truths and the shape-shifting, multifaceted nature of reality becomes palpable. If the quest for truth leads us away from a textbook understanding of history, are we still willing to follow its traces? This immersive installation thus encapsulated the midpoint between personal micro narratives and the collective weight of nation building in a nebulous space––where our perception had to fracture in order to constitute a new point of view.
