Cambodia, 2022
Treasure introduces a new body of work by Neak Sophal consisting of 24 portrait photographs and a video documenting the lives and perseverance of farming families from three provinces in Cambodia.
Sophal is known for her photographic practice, which regularly employs performative portraiture to illustrate the social reality of Cambodian women, the working class, and fragile communities. In this new series, the artist depicts farmers, who appear to be mostly middle-aged women and men, standing and facing directly into the camera. Each person reaches out both hands together, holding things such as rice, fruit, plant, frogs, animal dung, soil, and water. However, their faces are covered.
The gesture of the people seems as if they are showing us, or even offering us, those natural produce and objects. Behind them is a striking presence of a horizontal golden strip which works to highlight the held objects. Here, the photographs’ main subject shifts from the people depicted to the presented objects.
As we learn more about their stories, the photographs’ captions confirm that these objects are vital to their livelihoods. They are indeed their food sources, their commodities, and their harvest. Most of the stories seemingly sound quite banal, narrating rural lives with routines, challenges, and complaints. However, they also allude to the precarious food stock and depleting resources in the face of climate change and economic hardship.
Presence of land is strong and recurring in Sophal’s photographs. The “golden treasures” in the farmers’ hands often fall off onto the ground. It seems to suggest their evasion, their gradual diminishment; they go back to the earth where they come from. On the other hand, the golden strip not only brings to the fore these “treasure” being held, but at the same time demarcates the territories, the soil, the lands, upon which generations of their families depend.
For this project, Sophal traveled across the northern, central, and southern provinces of Cambodia, where she met with rural families to learn how they cope with environmental and economic challenges. Adopting a semi-ethnographic approach, the artist insists that the process of making this series, like her many other projects, is more important than the final photographs produced. For her, the process of people sharing their stories in the making is the heart of the work. Indeed, when people tell their stories, they exercise their agency. Sophal believes everyone has a story to tell, and in this case, calls our attention to the stories from the ground.
In a no-dialogue video document, Sophal allows us to see a glimpse of the daily life of the farmers in motion. We hear the atmospheric sound of the villages, the landscapes, their activities, and the objects falling off their hands onto the ground. Their identities are not revealed as if not necessary, turning our attention to their collective force of actions. The video starts with a scene of lush golden rice paddies and ends with a man walking over a recently harvested land towards the horizon without a clear purpose.
Treasure calls us to listen to the stories of some individual farmers. However, by concealing their respective identities, the photographs somehow transform them into a collective – although not homogeneous – community of farmers at large who ultimately are the backbone of Cambodia’s food security and economy. Yet, they are among the most immediate communities affected by climate change and economic instability.
In Treasure, the farmers confront the viewers as they stand still on the lands they cultivate and live on. They present themselves as witnesses of change, of struggle and determination, of precarity and strength, and of the collective impact they bear. The actual living treasures in Sophal’s work perhaps are not the objects in the farmers’ hands but the farmers themselves, as honored and illuminated by the organically-shaped golden masks on their faces.
