Skin Shade Night Day (2022)
Porter Street Commission at ACE Gallery, Adelaide, AustraliaSupported by the Government of South Australia (Arts SA)
4-channel video and 12-channel sound installation with shade cloth, rope, fishing wire and coconut coir, 45 minutes
Curator: Patrice Sharkey
Producers: Chris Luscri, Anastasia Comelli
Sound mix & spatialisation: Josh Peters
Colourist: Niklas Malkin
Photography: installation view, The National 4: Australian Art Now, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney, 2023, photograph: Jenni Carter, Anna Kučera
Video Documentation: Ben Golotta
Skin Shade Night Day explores the daily routine and rituals practised by the artist’s Cambodian-Australian family, which are reperformed and documented through a process of embodied empathy. Acts of service, such as gardening and cooking, play out as echoes from the past across a sound and image installation displayed in a shadehouse. Spectres, shadows and aural textures conjure up impressions of a place that remembers how its inhabitants once lived.
Artist Statement
The first shade house was built with a wooden structure, planted in the ground of a rental property my family moved into after many months of finding a place for the project. It served as a place for my parents to grow their own garden—something I felt like they needed after selling the farm we had lived in for 17 years. Living with them again was also an opportunity to immerse myself in their lifestyle, largely unchanged since migrating from Cambodia over 40 years ago, and a chance to embody their routine, often done by hand.
While weeding with a hoe, my mum told me how her brother injured himself with one during the Khmer Rouge — something I always think about now when I use the tool. Physically experiencing these things for myself was a way for me to understand what they endured. Through gardening, I came to understand what it was like to look after a living thing everyday, to put in the work for its well-being and to watch it grow, not unlike the effort of raising children.
Closing the windows and making sure the doors were locked were also part of the daily routine. Physical barriers such as screen doors, bars and mesh are both forms of protection and, at the same time, entrap the plants and figures within. The sense of security has always been a priority in my family ever since experiencing a time without it, especially during the Khmer Rouge and refugee camp in the late 70’s and early 80’s. These rituals from the past have endured for so long, shaping my parents’ way of living.
My parents have always been collecting hard rubbish and picking up things left on the street to reuse into something else. This project saw used furniture repurposed into garden beds, plant containers and wooden support for the shadehouse. I realised my parents’ way of creatively transforming the used goods they find available to them is not dissimilar to my process of reimagining the environment around me into a heightened reality.
The only human presence that appears is in the form of shadow figures. My grandma is partially blind and her mental state has been deteriorating — her reliance on sound and increasing paranoia has been channelled into the atmosphere of the work. Every passing shadow becomes a figure once recognised.
While the original shade house continues to be a living and working site, the final shade house evokes the rituals lived, mediated and transformed. It’s a place that conjures up the past where memories and fears echo through its haunted walls.
Blind Body (2021)
Documentary/Experimental short, 15 minsTrailer
Synopsis
As abstract shapes come into focus, dim memories surface. With Blind Body, Allison Chhorn offers an impressionistic portrait of her grandmother Kim Nay, a survivor of the Khmer Rouge. Partially blind, Kim spends her days in a mostly sonic and textural world, in which the sound of rain, the voices of Khmer radio, and distant birdsong summon the sensations of a lost homeland.
- New York Film Festival / Film at Lincoln Center
Press Kit - PDF
Festivals:
Visions du Réel Film Festival, Switzerland
Lima Alterna Film Festival, Peru
New York Film Festival, Currents Program, U.S.
Black Canvas Film Festival, Mexico
Valdivia International Film Festival, Chile
Chicago International Film Festival, U.S.
Cambodia International Film Festival, Cambodia
Linea d’Ombra Festival, Italy
Sydney Film Festival, Australia
Cámara Lúcida, Ecuador
Athens International Film and Video Festival, U.S.
Human Rights Arts & Film Festival, Australia
St Kilda Film Festival, Australia
Laterale Film Festival, Italy
Adelaide Film Festival, Australia
Brisbane International Film Festival, Australia (Best Australian Documentary Short Film)
Izmir International Short Film Festival, Turkey
London International Film Festival, UK
Brussels Independent Film Festival, Belgium
IAWRT Asian Women's Film Festival, India
Reel Good Film Festival, Australia
Missing (2021)
7 minsCommissioned by Prototype, curated by Lauren Carroll Harris.
The separation and distance of the Cambodian diaspora is embodied in two generations of a mother and daughter living apart from each other.
Threading common questions of longing and inverting language between English and Khmer, the footage includes a trip to the US & Canada in 2019, excerpt from a poetry reading by Monica Sok and a photograph of my mother and her missing friend from the Khao-I-Dang refugee camp.
The Plastic House (2019)
Docu-fiction, Experimental, 46 mins
Language: Khmer & English
SYNOPSIS
A young woman constructs a solitary reality by imagining what life would be like after the passing of her parents. Absorbed in the slow process of working alone in the family’s green house, she relives shadow memories of her Cambodian mother and father. The healing ritual of physical labour gradually reveals itself over time. As the plastic roof bears the weight of natural elements, the increasingly precarious weather threatens this new life alone.
Press Kit - PDF download
FESTIVALS
Oct 2019 - OzAsia Festival - World Premiere, curated by Nicholas Godfrey
April 2020 - Visions du Réel - International Premiere, Switzerland
Burning Lights Competition
June 2020 - Sydney Film Festival - Documentary Australia Foundation
Aug 2020 - MIFF 68½ - Melbourne International Film Festival
Aug 2020 - Festival ECRÃ - Brazil Online
Sept 2020 - FIDBA - Argentina Online
Sept 2020 - New York Film Festival, Currents Section, US online
Sept 2020 - Lima Alterna Film Festival, Peru online
(Winner of the International Competition)
Oct 2020 - Black Canvas Film Festival, Mexico online
Oct 2020 - FICValdivia, Chile online
Oct 2020 - Linea d'Ombra Festival, Italy online
Nov 2020 - RIDM, Montreal International Documentary Festival
Québec online
Nov 2020 - Pravo Ljudski Film Festival, Sarajevo online
Dec 2020 - Beijing International Short Film Festival
Sept 2021 - EXiS Experimental Film and Video Festival, South Korea
Jan 2022 - Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, QAGOMA, Australia
Select REVIEWS / ARTICLES
By Adrian Martin:
"Like in Chantal Akerman’s classic Jeanne Dielman … (1975), the absorption in everyday duties and gestures of work creates its own, unusual kind of tension – as well as its own unfolding drama."
CityMag article - Family, Identity & the Asian-Australian experience in ‘The Plastic House’
By Laura Davis at Film Explorer:
“The Plastic House is a poignant and oblique poem. Its silences stir and images tear.”
By Mónica Delgado at Desistfilm:
“In times of isolation, Chhorn’s film appears as a déjà vu , not only because it explores a type of solitude that fits well with the climate of social distancing, but because from its mode of production (to the extent that the filmmaker did, in all sense, the film), allows the hope of the continuity of the cinema, from the “do it yourself”, and the investigation of the language of the cinema from minimal resources, but with absolute inventiveness.”
By Francisco Álvarez at Cámara Lúcida:
“The real world and the dream world become indiscernible.”
By Joshua Brunsting at CriterionCast:
"Almost the definition of a tone poem, Chhorn’s film is an unforgettable experiment in narrative, looking at one woman’s attempt to combat her grief by tending to her family greenhouse."
By Kyle Faulkner on Letterboxd:
“Slow, ethereal, melancholic and pensive.”
By Dannzel Escobar on FilmStreet:
“Her films evoke something highly textured and viscerally felt...”
Interview at Film in Revolt with Isabelle
By Addy Fong at Something You Said:
“Chhorn’s parents in the The Plastic House show a keen interest in gardening, which seems to parallel the experience of many migrant families including mine who often struggle trying to settle into a new country whose customs feel foreign to them.”
By Louise Sheedy at Senses of Cinema:
"The film feels both universal and highly specific: a gift to those that have lost and a peek into an incredibly private, lonely experience."
By Claire Cao at Roughcut:
“For her, the possibility of loss not only comes with grief, but also the weight of hereditary responsibility.”
Last Time (2018)
Narrative short, 4:33 minA dress. A couple. He holds on to the past but does she see a future? Or will this be the last time?
Watch here.
"The flow of images across different moods, temporalities and intersubjective sensations suggests an immersion in the cinema of Alain Resnais and Claire Denis... crystalline, poised, wordless, highly condensed to the point of elliptical but suggestive mystery."
- Adrian Martin
Full review here.
Official selection for the Adelaide Film Festival, 2018.
Close ups (2015)
Silent video in 9:16 aspect ratio, 2.32 min.
Watch here.
Influenced by experimental film-maker Stan Brakhage and drawing from his themes of birth, sex and death, Close Ups enlarges the body and blurs it in it's own environment.
Playing with light and movement, the video explores the primal and haptic. Jumping from skin-space to surface-space, the rhythmic nuances of shadows and pulses suggests disorientation. Through impulsive movements, the close ups of bare skin, shadow and light stretched across the screen become both familiar and alienating.
Screened as part of the 9:16 Film Festival in Port Adelaide, Australia, 2015.
Selected with group exhibition Disembodied at FELTspace, 2015.
Memory House
July - September 2022Photographic exhibtion at Java Creative Cafe, Phnom Penh, Cambodia
Sleepwalking Under A Plastic Sky (2013)
35mm negative photographs.
Plastic & Ashes (2013)
Photography on 35mm film
After (series)
Oil on mdf, Acrylic on perspex, 59.6 x 104.4 cm each (iPhone 5 dimensions)
Before & After - installation
Smoke (pov)
Oil on mdf, Acrylic on Perspex, 59.6 x 104.4 cm each
Exhibited at Helpmann graduation show, 2014.
