Reflections in the Water
Allison Chhorn
8 August – 6 September 2025
Reflections in the Water explores the intergenerational process of remembering through fragments of recreated archival material depicting the Cambodian countryside along the Mekong River. The immersive installation becomes a water sanctuary, highlighting the equally healing and destructive nature of this essential element in the tropical climate of Cambodia.
Through recreated fragments of archival material, Chhorn invites viewers into an ephemeral meditation on memory, loss, and cultural continuity. In her hauntingly poetic reimagining, the ghost of her great-grandparents' Cambodian riverside house, now vanished due to the Mekong’s relentless erosion, becomes a vessel for reflecting on lives once lived.
Using docu-fictional techniques and Super 8-style footage, she stitches together vignettes of rural existence, rice planting, coconut cutting, communal cooking, each scene vivid yet incomplete, like memory itself. A floating house, crafted from tea-stained muslin, evokes both the murky floodwaters and the fragility of tradition. The duality of water in the tropical climate of Cambodia, essential for everyday living but equally destructive with flash flooding, speaks to the value of traditional living, the potential of a lost culture and the importance of intergenerational memory.
Allison Chhorn is a Cambodian-Australian filmmaker and interdisciplinary artist living on Kaurna Land (South Australia). Her work explores the effects of migrant displacement and post-memory through impressionistic forms across film and moving-image installation. Such works include "The Plastic House" (2019) and "Skin Shade Night Day" (2022).
@ac_aota
Reflections in the Water
By Allison Chhorn
8 August – 6 September 2025Outer Space
Open Wednesday to Saturday, 10am–5pm
420 Brunswick Street,
Judith Wright Arts Centre,
Fortitude Valley, QLD
Exhibition Text
By Nikki Lam
An image of a waterway hovers over a house structure it is projected on, touching the material world gently with its light. Water drips, splashes, flows through its soundscape. Flooded with a type of longing, an opaque inquiry into a past that is re-appearing in the present. What do you dream of at night? Reaching from the other side of the river, the image shifts from black and white to colour, static landscapes to intimate moments with families, the Mekong, and life along the waterways.
Cover Image: Courtesy of Allison Chhorn
Artist Portrait: Courtesy of Allison Chhorn, Photograph by Alex Nguyen
Public Program
In Conversation | Allison Chhorn & John Edmond
11am–12pm
Saturday 9 August 2025
Free entry, all welcome
Acknowledgements / Credits
Producer: Chris Luscri
Additional Super 8 Cinematography & Hand Development: Bryce Kraehenbuehl
Sound Design & Mix: Josh Peters
Studio Assistant: Lucinda Corin
Seamstress: Isobel Davies
Thank you family and friends in Cambodia, Lyno Vuth, Nicholas Godfrey, Carmela Luscri, Anastasia Comelli and Pantelis Georgiadas
Supported by Create SA and Nexus Arts
Gallery
COMING SOON