IdentiCity, a collaboration with Cambodian painter Rena Chheang

Project composed by photography and installation, and paintings by the Cambodian artist Rena Chheang. The installation consisted on reclaimed pallet, second-hand bricks, broken mirror, incense sticks, common red paint and cheap mats regularly found in Cambodian homes.

Some of her paintings exhibited with my photos can be find here.

The dream of breaking the cycle, reflections of hopeful futures, personal identities within social classes and hierarchies. Rena Chheang’s paintings investigate the multitude of lives in a Cambodian city, the conditions of its inhabitants and their different and highly individual paths to development and happiness. Stories of Buddhist monks, street kids or survivors of Khmer Rouge, her canvas aim to be a visual poetry about Cambodian society, a storytelling tool for a country in its process of growing up.

Survival and luxury, struggling and thriving. Cambodia, and especially Phnom Penh, is a land filled with contrasts. Miguel Jerónimo makes photographs of high-end buildings on construction phase (or newly built infrastructures) collide with portraits of informal workers or some of the most iconic members of the Khmer street landscape: trash collectors and squatters, street sellers and factory workers, street kids and fishermen, tuk-tuk drivers and working children. The color differences and unexpected juxtapositions become a visual representation of the gap between these two realities, the poor and the rich, a reflection on privilege and inequality. A poetic methodology to talk about economic development and those who are being left behind by it.