About the Exhibition
សូរស្ត្រី | Her Sounds is a collaborative multimedia research project and exhibition celebrating the passion, persistence, and power of Cambodia’s women artists through image, sound, and story. Featuring artist portraits by photographer Neak Sophal and accompanying sound pieces created from interviews with ethnomusicologist Emily Howe, the exhibition constructs a living archive of the significant contributions women artists make to Cambodian society by documenting the perspectives of culture-bearers, innovators, and community artists spanning the nation and generations. Showcasing the artistry of traditional, classical, popular, and contemporary musicians and dancers while also illuminating the social significance of quotidian practices including social dance, ritual chant, and lullaby, the exhibition aims to spark dialogue about the art, lives, and dreams of Cambodian women past, present, and future.
In Cambodia, knowledge of the performing arts is traditionally passed from mouth to ear and from body to body. Listening to these artists’ stories, we hear of the sounds of music transmitted to eager students through the wind and on radio waves; we learn of the painful efficiency of the fingernail as a mode of teaching classical dance form; and we gain insight into how women negotiate life events including marriage, pregnancy, and aging through their bodies, their voices, and their art.
And yet we also hear about how these knowledge-laden bodies often become sites for the projection of broader stereotypes and anxieties about women; for, as they share their knowledge on stage, women performing artists often subject themselves and their bodies to criticism and even violence.
Neak Sophal’s images reflect the dichotomies that characterize the lives of many women performing artists: the simultaneous pain and joy that characterize early study; the troubling precarity and simultaneous sense of freedom that emerge as women pursue careers in the arts; the ways in which the past continues to resonate in photographs and in gestures carried in the body from generation to generation; and the ways in which those same bodies are the sites for transformation both via natural processes of aging and disabling, as well as creative processes of artistic innovation. The black-and-white artist portraits, printed on stickers, may show signs of age and wear as the exhibition continues; ultimately, like the bodies of the artists, those images will be thrown away. And yet, existing simultaneously as symbolized in the framed color photographs which will outlast the exhibition, these artists’ knowledge and skill will survive in the memories, sounds, and gestures passed on to the next generation.
The artist portraits are exhibited from oldest to youngest in a clockwise circle around the gallery space. We invite you to allow the sound of these artist’s voices to guide you around the gallery in a manner akin to the circling of a pagoda in a Buddhist ritual. In Buddhist ceremonies, this circling is meant to provoke meditation on life’s cycles of birth, aging, sickness, death, and rebirth. In this exhibition, our aim is to incite similar reflection on continuity and change; transmission and transformation; and the negotiation of past, present, and future in women’s lives and in the arts across generations.
Taken separately, each artists’ story represents their particular achievements and worldview; taken together, they chart something of a history of women’s contribution to the arts and cultural life in contemporary Cambodia.
And yet, this archive is by its very nature limited and unfinished. And so, before you leave the exhibition, we invite you to contribute your own song, dance, or story. Enter the chamber in the center of the room, explore the exhibition YouTube channel, engage with the questions posed to you, and record yourself responding on the exhibition tablet. Next time you visit the exhibition, your story may be archived on the YouTube channel, too.
No matter who we are and where we come from, women's words, songs, and stories shape our lives and understanding of the world. Join us in celebrating សូរស្ត្រី | Her Sounds.