Select Exhibitions + Installations

Year Title
2022 Waiting for Enlightenment
2022 Two Hearts
2021 Losing My Religion
2020 if we want it
2017 Holiday in Cambodia
2017 A single journey can change the course of a life
2016 Idol/Idle

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Two Hearts
ចិត្តពីរ

(Video) (Credit)

INSTALLATION VIEWS

ចិត្តពីរ (Two Hearts), 2022. One-channel video (color, sound; 2 min.) and gold plastic home shrine, dimensions variable.

In the early 2000s, several major international news outlets and independent video bloggers published stories and shared images and videos of then-seven-year-old Cambodian boy Oun Sambath with his pet giant python, Chamroeun (Khmer: ចំរើន). Describing their “chance encounter,” Sambath recalls: “My mom took me to a fortune teller who told her that we were brother and sister in a past life” (Kohnert, The Cambodia Daily, 2011).

To reframe the spectacle of the child–animal pairing as mere curiosity, I draw on motifs of sentimentalism and vernacular Theravada Buddhism via the pop ballad Two Hearts by Khmer artist Sokmean (a cover of the original Thai version) through lyric captions/translations and rhythmic editing. Installed on a CRT monitor set on a home shrine, the piece focalizes the fragile bonds of human–nonhuman kinship amid perceived danger (predator/prey) and considers how our gazes are shaped by the circulation of images of children from the Global South.

SOPHEAK SAM

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