Rather than approaching these histories through conventional documentary testimony, Allison works impressionistically and often through members of her own family, accumulating images, sounds, photographs and observations over many years. Domestic environments—the family market garden, greenhouse and home—as well as landscapes in Cambodia become living archives in which memory is carried through labour, plants, weather, architecture, sound and repeated everyday gestures. Increasingly, she has been interested in the way images themselves deteriorate, regenerate and acquire new meanings through analogue processes, projection and re-presentation. An important part of the process is experiencing the lived environment as it changes over time.
Her cinema is formally spare, tactile and strongly sonic. The Plastic House (2019), an imagined portrait of her family greenhouse after the eventual absence of her parents, established many of the concerns that continue through her work. Blind Body (2021), an impressionistic portrait of her partially blind grandmother Kim Nay, a survivor of the Khmer Rouge, constructs memory principally through fragments of vision, environmental sound and sensory experience. Her films have screened internationally at Visions du Réel, New York Film Festival's Currents programme, Valdivia, Chicago, Sydney and the Cambodian International Film Festival, among others.
Over the past several years Allison has increasingly extended this cinematic language into spatial work. Skin Shade Night Day (2022), commissioned by ACE and subsequently presented in The National 4 at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, transformed the rhythms of her family's domestic and agricultural life into a four-channel image and twelve-channel sound installation incorporating shade-house materials. Later works including Reflections in the Water, Disintegrate/Regenerate and Fruit Tree Sun also incorporates an expanded cinema of different mediums such as Super 8, photography, projection, sculptural materials and multichannel sound.
Her recent work has also brought her physically closer to Cambodia. Rather than treating Cambodia solely as an inherited or imagined homeland, she has begun filming and researching there directly, examining places associated with family histories and considering the instability of both personal and historical archives. The same material can evolve across forms: research or Super 8 footage may become a gallery installation, an independent film, an object or a sound work. This permeability between cinema and exhibition is increasingly central to the practice.
Despite the growing institutional scale of the work, Allison retains an unusually self-authored and intimate mode of production. She frequently shoots and edits her own films and works with a small recurring circle of collaborators. The result is a body of work that feels less like a series of discrete films or exhibitions than an expanding personal archive—one continually revisited, degraded, reconstructed and transformed as her relationship to family, place and inherited history changes.
Contact: allison.chhorn[at]gmail[dot]com
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