Allison Chhorn is a Cambodian-Australian filmmaker and interdisciplinary artist living on Kaurna Land (South Australia). Her work explores the effects of migrant displacement and post-memory through impressionistic forms, often with other family members as subjects.
Since graduating with Honours in painting at UniSA in 2014, she has made numerous films including “Blind Body”, “Missing” and “The Plastic House”. The latter was filmed on her family’s farm and has screened at MIFF, New York Film Festival and the Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art. Her films were also screened as part of a retrospective at the 11th Cambodian International Film Festival. Crossing into the gallery, she received the 2022 Porter St Commission from ACE Gallery to make her first solo exhibition and multi-channel installation “Skin Shade Night Day” which was exhibited as part of The National at MCA in 2023. She has since exhibited her second solo show at Outer Space, Brisbane (Magandjin), her third solo show at Nexus Arts, Adelaide (Tarntanya) and had recent screenings at ACMI and 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art.
She works between the intersections of cinema and installation where the darkened room illuminates fragments and impressions of familial history. By working between the gaps of knowledge and history left from the aftermath of the Khmer Rouge, she reimagines the threads of connection within her Cambodian heritage and diasporic identity. Through the practice of filming, photographing, listening and recording to her surroundings, the collected material over several years becomes a personal archive and a body of tactile memory. She endeavours to uncover the unspoken fragments of Intergenerational memory through embodied empathy and the moving image.
Contact: allison.chhorn[at]gmail[dot]com
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