Disintegrate/Regenerate
(‘Memory House’ revisited) 2013/2025
Single-channel video, 12 mins, 35mm black and white photographs, sheer linen
Exhibited 19 Sept - 9 Nov at Bathurst Regional Art Gallery as part of ‘A Tear in the Fabric’ curated by Con Gerakaris at 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art.
Produced by Chris Luscri.
Produced on Kaurna Land.
“The process of disintegration is often gradual - a slow, fibrous crumbling into decay and dust. This physical and conceptual phenomenon is core to the of Cambodian-Australian filmmaker and artist Allison Chhorn as she examines the challenging and knotty relationship between place and memory. In Disintegrate/Regenerate (‘Memory House’ Revisited) (2025), Chhorn engages with her personal archive of still and moving images, reinterpreting the photographic series Memory House (2022) through the examination of material and visual degradation, housed in a ghostly, floating installation.
Built around a collection of 35mm black and white photographs taken between 2012 and 2013, Memory House documents the artist’s life and experience working on her family’s market garden on the outskirts of Adelaide. The series served as a study for Chhorn’s doc-fiction film The Plastic House (2019), a haunting piece about grief and the passage of time anchored to memories tied to location.
For this exhibition, the artist coalesces the diverse strands of her practice into a new installation exploring the relationship between reproductive disintegration and recollective memory.
As time passes and people change, the clarity of a memory obscures into evocative symbols, analogous to Chhorn’s material treatment of transposing film photography into a digital medium and again back into a new object through projection. With Disintegrate/Regenerate (‘Memory House’ Revisited) Chhorn poses a subtle provocation: With every reproduction, as the image disintegrates, does it also generate something new?”
- Con Gerakaris