Evening Talk: Hidden

In this special event to mark Holocaust Memorial Day, Charles Fox will share his current project Hidden, exploring one family’s photography and journey during the Cambodian genocide. He will be joined by artist Dayanny So and Dr Mark Rawlinson from the University of Nottingham to discuss the absence of photography and shifting political powers of visualisation during the Khmer Rouge, and how we might represent the unseen. 

Hidden is a result of a long-term dialog between photographer and researcher Charles Fox with one Cambodian family. The project and resulting book explore the journey that the family made through the Khmer Rouge (1975 – 1979) landscape carrying over 90 family photographs, concealed for safety. As part of the work, the family recreated their journey and wrote about their experiences during the Khmer Rouge. This writing forms a major part of the book, alongside concealed elements of the photographs in response to the absence of photography through shifting political complications. The book will be on display as part of the event. 

Holocaust Memorial Day remembers the six million Jews murdered during the Holocaust, alongside the millions of other people killed under Nazi persecution of other groups and during more recent genocides in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia and Darfur.   

Charles Fox is a photographer and practice-based researcher working with a focus on visual methodologies and collaborative community-based practice. Splitting his time between the UK and South East Asia, Charles has worked in Cambodia since 2006. 

Dayanny So’s artistic practice is deeply rooted in a Cambodian upbringing and the unexpected journey that brought the artist to the UK as a young adult. It draws inspiration from a rich tapestry of experiences, memories, and cultural influences, including the complexities of displacement that are often overlooked in understanding the postgenocide experience.  

Exploring the dynamic and entwined popular cultures of East and West through fine art practice, central themes often carry the significance of his birthplace. Music, classical Khmer sculptures, artisan handcrafts, national identity and textiles address the social and political issues of Cambodia’s turbulent past. The personal struggles as an immigrant, form layers of familiar imagery and narratives within conceptual installations.  

The traditional and tactile craftmanship evident in the work holds profound meaning for him. As a child, he spent countless hours making toys and objects for himself. This experience shapes an artistic process that involves diverse media and making activities. Despite the variation, recurrent thematic concerns, the associations of chosen textiles and a consistent practice-based research methodology provide a sense of formal coherence. Dayanny’s investigative creative journey is characterised by the continuous flow of ideas and interests. Each body of work emerges from feeding the previous one, the subject matter dictating its materials and form of expression. From this developmental progression, an evolving body of work reflects the way experiential artworks arise out at the intersections of cultures and identities. 

Mark Rawlinson is Associate Professor in Art History and the Director of the Centre for Research in Visual Culture at the University of Nottingham. His current research traces the development of US photography in the post-war period, reading its growth as a regionally specific phenomenon, a shift rooted in the emergence of photographic education in US art schools of the period. Upcoming publications include an essay on US photographer, Grey Crawford – ‘California Austere’ – and a small book project based on his exhibition, Homage to the Bauhaus, which is called The Bauhaus and Latin America. Both are to be published by Beam Edition.