Prey Veng (Bomb Ponds series)

2009 - Photography (Photography)

36 x 43.5 inches (91 x 111 cm)

Vandy Rattana

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Vandy Rattana’s Bomb Ponds series was made following a transformative encounter with the craters left over from 2,756,941 tons of bombs dropped by U. S. forces during the Vietnam War between 1964 and 1973. Dissatisfied with the level of documentation on the bombing and its repercussions, the artist began to study the historiography of his country. He travelled to the ten most severely bombed provinces, engaging villagers in locating and testifying to the existence of the craters, and how they are lived with today. Vandy’s practice recalls that of Cambodian artists such as Svay Ken, whose paintings note both the ordinary and the unexpected. In a country where photography plays a critical documentary role—in images of the Khmer Rouge’s S-21 interrogation center Tuol Sleng, for example, or the memorialization of Khmer Rouge violence housed in the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum,– Bomb Ponds stands as witness to a continuing struggle against Cambodian historical revisionism. The work also asks us to consider how the environment continues to shape the lives and memories of multiple generations by bearing the scars of traumatic pasts.

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A self-taught photographer, Vandy Rattana has focused on challenging conditions in Cambodia, his home country, by documenting natural and manmade disasters. His works serve to contradict the images of Cambodia that have been most widely captured and circulated. From the early ethnographic gaze during the French Protectorate to recent decades of war reportage, genocide studies, and cliché’s of tourism. Born into the tenuous recovery period after the official fall of the Khmer Rouge, Rattana began photographing as a form of continuity, concerned with the lack of physical documentation of the micro narratives, more personal stories, traits and monuments unique to his history and culture. His early serial works straddled the line between strict photojournalism and conceptual practice, and all displayed a preoccupation with the everyday as experienced by the average Cambodian. With subjects ranging from casual domestic situations involving Rattana’s family to labor conditions on today’s rubber plantations and the building of the capital’s first skyscraper, Rattana’s early series chronicled the contemporary moment while creating a more comprehensive archive for future generations. Rattana co-founded the artists’ collective Stiev Selapak in 2007, and with them opened the alternative space Sa Sa Art Gallery in 2009, followed by Sa Sa Art Projects in 2010, both in Phnom Penh.

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Colors:

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• war.n.01
• weapon.n.01
• trauma.n.02
• landscape.n.01
• destruction.n.01
• monument.n.02