o’russei exhibit [2007]

The O’Russei Exhibit aimed to collect, document and digitalized the community’s scattered and often lost personal visual archives from the pre-war(s) era.

The project came about as I was doing research on the rare family photos remaining from the before Khmer Rouge regime of erasure: as I was researching those images, I realized that many of my interlocutors didn’t have access to the portraits of their own loved ones, as those had been displaced and discarded.

After digitalizing the photographs and making enlargements, a one day exhibit at the mosque was organized during Eid with the encouragements of the community leaders. 

Additional prints and engraved CDs were provided to the photographs’ owners, family members and kept in the mosque as a repository.