Vandy Rattana

Born in Cambodia in the aftermath of the Khmer Rouge and having grown up in Phnom Penh, Vandy Rattana portrays episodes of historical violence through understated and tranquil images. He began his photography practice in 2005. His serial work employed a range of analog cameras and formats, straddling the line between strict photojournalism and artistic practice.

His recent works mark a shift in philosophy surrounding the relationship between historiography and image making. For Vandy Rattana, photographs are now fictional constructions, abstract and poetic surfaces, histories of their own.

Since the photographic work and documentary Bomb Ponds (2009), in which his photos of bomb craters articulate the psychological wounds of Cambodians who survived American carpet bombing between 1964 and 1973, Vandy Rattana has been scanning the idyllic Cambodian countryside with his viewfinders and revealing its traumatic past. After his first short-film MONOLOGUE (2015), he released the short-film FUNERAL in 2018 and …far away, over there, the ocean (2019).

In 2007, he was one of the co-founders of Stiev Selapak / Art Rebels, and in 2009 he was also one of the co-founders of Sa Sa Art Gallery. He contributed, in 2011, to establish SA SA BASSAC, the first dedicated exhibition spaces for contemporary art in Cambodia. In 2014, he also co-founded Ponleu Association (non-profit); which aims to provide access to international reference books, through their translation and publication in Khmer. Ponleu also publishes its own books, focusing on various fields of knowledge (philosophy, literature, science, etc.)

Vandy Rattana is presenting his film Monologue at OFF Focus 2025: Everything in its Time 

Monologue is a moving address of Cambodia’s violent past and in many ways, a study of the nature of trauma – how it collapses time and space and makes distancing from, and thus forgetting history, an impossible task. Both personal and public in nature, the film documents a small plot of land near the rural Banteay Meanchey province (formerly Battambang), where Rattana’s sister and grandmother were discarded and buried alongside five thousand others during the Khmer Rouge regime in 1978. An idyllic portrait of the landscape at first glance, the work is a sobering reminder of both the literal and psychological void left behind after the conflict. Rattana’s monologue to the sister he never met, who passed away three years before he was born, reveals his struggle to come to terms with the senseless violence and loss experienced by his family and the country. The emptiness in the landscape suggests a deep trauma that can never be represented wholly and thus, never fully comprehended. Against these tranquil scenes, the atrocities he speaks of seem all the more inhuman and unfathomable, becoming increasingly disquieting to comprehend as the video unfolds.