Writer, editor and artist,
This essay is a brief description of the role of visual images of atrocity in the official and personal memorialisation of the Cambodian genocide, focusing on the Tuol Sleng prison/torture-extermination centre and the nearby Choeung Ek ‘killing field ’where the Khmer Rouge daily executed batches of the condemned. The essay raises questions about the institutionalization of collective memory through photographs and paintings of the genocide that are now collectively and individually assimilated as part of a national history, a national archive and a national identity. It examines the relationship of such images to the cognitive shock they produce when viewed at the actual site of atrocity, and asks whether processes of indirect viewing (through the digital dissemination/continuing afterlife of these images) have a different emotional resonance. The essay affirms the evidentiary nature of images of atrocity, and also invokes the metaphysics of such images, i.e., the relationship of a particular material ‘reality ’to the visual representations of that reality. It asks whether the mass trauma of genocide can ever be adequately memorialised, through any medium, when the atrocity is itself so unspeakable that it seems to transcend all modes of documentary and symbolic narration.
Memory, Tuol Sleng, Killing Field, Genocide, Museum
