Observance and Memorial: Photographs from S-21, Cambodia
Earlier this month, Erica Lehrer and I travelled to Toronto to view Observance and Memorial: Photographs from S-21, Cambodia, an exhibit at the Royal Ontario Museum’s Institute for Contemporary Culture (ICC) on the atrocities committed under the rule of the Khmer Rouge between 1975 and 1979. The ICC also hosted a two-day symposium featuring discussions with scholars (including Erica), journalists, community members, a survivor of the Cambodian genocide, and Steven Okazaki’s documentary film on the S-21 head photographer, The Conscience of Nhem En.
Our visit extended a dialogue started earlier with one of the exhibit’s two curators, Carla Rose Shapiro, who visited CEREV last March to discuss the use of survivor narratives within exhibition spaces. Upon our arrival, Dr. Shapiro led us through the exhibit and provided a glimpse into its production.
The exhibit consists of four main sections: an introduction that historically contextualizes the rise and fall of the Khmer Rouge (1975-1979); the core exhibit of 103 photographs taken of the 14.000 men, women, and children prisoners who were interned, tortured, and killed at the S-21 prison in Phnom Penh, Cambodia; a reflection room with Buddhist texts, chants, and sculpture suggesting a funerary stupa; and a resource centre with additional information about contemporary Cambodian culture, a documentary film featuring Cambodian survivors living in Canada, information on the ongoing work of relevant human rights organizations, and a collection of supplementary reading materials.
As is often the case with exhibits I encounter, I felt most compelled by the tensions embedded within the exhibit and in the harder-to-access “backstage” of its production. Dr. Shapiro shared her own struggles with deciding how to frame the exhibit, particularly concerning the graphic nature of the atrocities that defined the Khmer Rouge and the tragic deaths of the mainly anonymous prisoners presented on the museum’s walls. One of the most important accomplishments of the exhibit for Shapiro was the inclusion of biographical information about four victims provided by surviving friends and family members. This small section in the exhibit provided a fuller sense of those who were murdered as multi-faceted individuals rather than anonymous victims.
Shapiro insisted that these photographs not be received as art, but as evidence of historical atrocity and human rights violations. While the original images existed as passport-sized photographs attached to administrative files documenting each prisoner and his or her forced “confession” to fabricated crimes, they have been reproduced into larger 10 x 10 cm silver gelatin prints, matted and framed, and displayed on gallery walls. This reproduction and re-presentation in some ways belies Shapiro’s agenda of minimizing any sense of aesthetics or artistry in the portraits’ display, while simultaneously making the photographs more visible and open to viewer engagement. Shapiro is aware of the contradictions involved in displaying the prisoner portraits, originally produced by a skilled photographer of the Khmer regime to document its genocide, in a museum context. For her the multiple contextualizations of these images helps to mitigate this challenge. I would have liked to see more explicit engagement with such questions surrounding the ethics of representation, which I believe cannot actually be resolved through curatorial framings.
For instance, another curatorial impulse that shaped the content and form of the Cambodia exhibit– and arguably contradicted the documentary impulse described above– was Shapiro’s desire to honor and respect the victims without exploiting or sensationalizing the horrific circumstances of their murder. To this end she made the curatorial decision to not include any of the photographs of mutilated, dead bodies alongside the prisoner portraits. Shapiro makes a compelling case for this decision, which she sees as an ethical choice, to celebrate life over death, and avoid voyeurism, but there are similarly ethical arguments to be made for including such uncomfortable images, particularly as part of a larger agenda of educating viewers about the brutality of the Khmer regime.
One way of making audiences grapple with these issues themselves would be to pose the question of what to display, or how one should look, to viewers directly. Rather that resolving this question for herself and then enacting it in the exhibit, I would have loved to see more of Shapiro’s curatorial process included in the exhibit itself. To me, as a museum goer, educator, and scholar grappling with questions around painful historical material myself, this would provide a more compelling opportunity for challenge and engagement than neat resolutions, such as that found in the ROM’s press release on the exhibit, which declares that it “properly contextualizes the S-21 prisoner portraits as documentary artifacts of crimes against humanity.”
Is there ever a “proper” way of representing mass atrocity and human suffering? “Proper” for whom? And who gets to decide? While committed to the search, I am not convinced such utopian endpoints actually exist. Perhaps the most productive approach is to more directly and explicitly address the unresolvable ethical dilemmas at the heart of all representations of violence.
Post by: Monica Eileen Patterson
