The Sixth Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

139 Vandy Rattana Fire of the year Cambodian photographer Vandy Rattana’s ‘Fire of the year’ 2008 is a poignant series of images of a blaze on the outskirts of Phnom Penh. The fire razed the district of Dteuk Tlah (Clear Water), where 300 families lived cheek-by-jowl in wooden homes above a polluted lake. Most of the buildings in the district perished, although some were saved through bribes and negotiations with the fire police. 1 Fires are common in today’s Cambodia, as Vandy notes: ‘they are part of our lives, like eating or playing sports’, 2 implying that the most unsettling aspect of this tragedy is its familiarity. ‘Fire of the year’ powerfully gestures to a deeper political condition in Cambodia — its expanding urban populations, and the limited infrastructure available to support them. 3 With their careful composition, these photographs provide a vital context in which to consider the reality of contemporary life in Cambodia, a concern which sustains the artist’s practice. These images are made all the more compelling through their visual finesse — specifically, the artist’s attention to detail, and his play with composition and depth of field. In one photograph, a fireman emerges from a cloud of smoke, framed by the grille of a security door and the tightly cropped head of an observer in the foreground. In another image, a fire hose spouts an arc of water into a billowing smoke stack, while another almost moves into abstraction, with its dense haze of smoke filling the frame, the outline of a TV antenna barely visible. There is a moment of sobering gravity — and perhaps precarious hope — in the final photograph of the series, where a small child, almost out of frame, fossicks among the debris floating on the lake for materials to sell on the streets. Vandy’s photographs evoke the rhythm and pulse of life in Cambodia. Working in series, he uses light, composition and subtle layers of colour to build associations between images. Photography is a practice unique to his generation of artists; his travel within the region as a resident artist and his experience as a press photographer has deepened his resolve to represent everyday realities. Vandy’s serial approach recalls the long history of narrative composition in Khmer art, where epic stories and legends are vividly illustrated in the fresco paintings and bas-reliefs of ancient temples. His images also have an intensely cinematic quality; the frame-by-frame approach and finely constructed compositions reveal situations of great drama and consequence, and are perhaps informed by the artist’s strong appreciation of film culture. Vandy’s evocative and sharply observed studies of his environment, however, suggest a passionate commitment to influence and communicate, rather than to simply document: My goal is to show life and invite people to examine life. I want my pictures to have the smell of my mother’s food and the sound of my father’s stories. 4 This intimacy can be seen in earlier works which portray quiet domestic interiors and social routines, such as games of chess in the street, as well as portraits of friends and family. His first solo exhibition, ‘Looking in My Office’, was a wry and candid portrayal of corporate behaviour. 5 When employed at a telecommunications company, Vandy captured the inner workings of the office environment by furtively snapping pictures of his colleagues — applying makeup, draped wearily across keyboards, and filing, endlessly filing. More recently, Vandy has undertaken a rigorous exploration of the built environment of Phnom Penh, where the changing cityscape has been supported by a meteoric rise in foreign investment. 6 Canadia Building 2007 documents the construction of the capital’s first skyscraper, while his collaborative project The building 2008 considers the social and demographic transformation of the city’s first public housing development, an iconic structure now slated for demolition. 7 As with ‘Fire of the year’, these images are considered observations of daily life that make critical connections between present-day narratives and the historical value inherent in chronicling the contemporary moment. As Vandy Rattana says: . . . it is important to create images because in Cambodia we lack an archive. Documentation is both a reflector and creator of history. We need documentation to help us understand the changes from generation to generation. 8 Mellissa Kavenagh Endnotes 1 The fire brigade is colloquially referred to as the ‘fire police’ in Cambodia, as cited by the artist in an email to the author, 22 August 2009. 2 Vandy, email to the author. 3 The various implications of population expansion, land management and urban planning in the capital are outlined further in Vann Molyvann, Modern Khmer Cities , Reyum Publishing, Phnom Penh, 2003, pp.111–15. 4 Vandy, email to the author. 5 ‘Looking in My Office’ was held at Popil Gallery in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, November 2006 – January 2007. 6 In recent times, Cambodia has experienced remarkable change, due in part to the dual quest for foreign investment and increased economic growth. See Adrian Levy and Cathy Scott-Clark, ‘Country for sale’, The Guardian , 26 April 2008. 7 Designed by architect Vann Molyvann, ‘The building’ is an example of the school of Khmer Modernism that flourished briefly under King Norodom Sihanouk in the 1950s and 1960s. Part of an ambitious city planning scheme, it has an important place in the history of modern Khmer architecture. See Ly Daravuth and Ingrid Muan, Cultures of Independence , Reyum Publishing, Phnom Penh, 2001, p.11. 8 Vandy Rattana, quoted in Erin Gleeson, ‘Avant-garde blaze new trails’, Phnom Penh Post , 12 August 2009.