Vandy Rattana

Vandy Rattana is a Cambodian photographer and filmmaker known for the Bomb Ponds series on the American bombing of Cambodia.

Illustration of a round water-filled crater pond in the Cambodian countryside at dusk. It shows no real place and none of the artist's photographs.

Creator details
Roles	Visual artist
Active	2005 to present
Based in	Cambodia

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Phnom Penh, Khmer Rouge and Stiev Selapak.

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On this page

1. Early life and training
2. Collectives and galleries
3. Work
4. Exhibitions
5. References

On this page

1. Early life and training
2. Collectives and galleries
3. Work
4. Exhibitions
5. References

Vandy Rattana is a Cambodian photographer and filmmaker, born in Phnom Penh in 1980. His best-known work, Bomb Ponds (2009), photographs the water-filled craters left in the Cambodian countryside by American bombing during the Vietnam War. He was a co-founder of the artist collective Stiev Selapak (Art Rebels) and of Sa Sa Art Gallery in Phnom Penh.

Early life and training

Vandy Rattana studied law at university for two years and left in 2005 to take up photography. He was drawn to the photojournalists who had recorded the effects of the Vietnam War and of the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia, and he is largely self-taught. Framer Framed says he began photographing out of concern that so little physical record survived of the stories, customs and monuments of his culture.

Collectives and galleries

In 2007 he and five other artists founded Stiev Selapak (Art Rebels) in Phnom Penh, an activist collective that ran workshops, residencies and joint art projects. In 2009 the group opened Sa Sa Art Gallery, which Art Encounters calls Phnom Penh's first artist-run exhibition space. In 2011 he helped set up SA SA BASSAC, and in 2014 he co-founded the Ponleu Association, which translates and publishes reference books in the humanities in Khmer.

Work

His early photographs sit between photojournalism and art. Over time he came to treat photographs less as plain records and more as constructed, poetic surfaces with histories of their own. Fire of the Year (2008) follows a small district on the edge of Phnom Penh as a fire burns it down. A photograph from the series was chosen for the Prix Pictet in 2009, and the series made him one of the first four Cambodian artists shown at the Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, in its sixth edition.

Bomb Ponds (2009) turns to the Cambodian provinces most heavily bombed by the United States military during the Vietnam War. Its photographs show quiet ponds among rice fields and forest, and BroadwayWorld wrote in 2013 that their calm hides the violent history of the land. The series was part of No Country: Contemporary Art for South and Southeast Asia, a traveling exhibition organized by the Guggenheim and UBS. In April and May 2013 Asia Society in New York showed the photographs with a video as Bomb Ponds: Vandy Rattana, part of the Season of Cambodia festival. He was also one of five artists in residence on Governors Island for that festival.

He began making films in 2014. In the video Monologue (2015) the narrator speaks to a sister he never met, standing over a landscape that has turned into rice fields. With Bomb Ponds and Funeral (2018) it forms a trilogy of films on the lasting effects of Cambodia's recent past.

Exhibitions

• 2009: 6th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane.
• 2013: Bomb Ponds, Asia Society Museum, New York.

References 6