Allison Chhorn, Skin Shade Night Day. Courtesy: the artist and Adelaide Contemporary Experimental.

Skin Shade Night Day is the first major solo exhibition by Allison Chhorn which explores the daily routine and rituals practised by the artist’s Cambodian-Australian family. 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 shade house. Spectres, shadows and aural textures conjure up impressions of a place that remembers how its inhabitants once lived.

As the daughter and granddaughter of Cambodian migrants, Chhorn’s work explores the personal and familial ricochets of the Khmer Rouge – a brutal political regime, from 1975-79, that claimed the lives of nearly two million Cambodians. Chhorn’s films obliquely approach the echoing traumas, memories, beliefs and behaviours of her family, particularly set against the Australian context.

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