Snarm takes its title from the Khmer word meaning both a scar and a trace. The exhibition reflects on how experiences of displacement leave marks that linger over time, shaping understandings of home not as something fixed or secure, but as something continually formed in response to changing conditions. While rooted in longer histories of conflict and movement, the work is shaped by contemporary realities, where displacement continues to structure everyday life in the present.
Bringing together photography and installation, Snarm examines forms of temporary domesticity. The photographic works are made through time spent in displacement camps. The images focus on everyday spaces formed within provisional living environments, foregrounding domestic traces and material arrangements that reveal how daily life is organised and maintained under instability.
Alongside the photographs, the exhibition includes a sculptural installation constructed from tarps, fabrics, and salvaged materials commonly used in makeshift shelters. Assembled within the gallery, the work extends the concerns of the photographs into physical space, emphasising both fragility and labour.
Presented within The Condensery’s Bomb Shelter, Snarm enters into dialogue with the site’s history as a place of protection and survival. In this context, the exhibition holds space for Cambodian and diasporic histories while also reflecting on displacement as a continuing condition, inviting consideration of what home means when it must be made, lost, and remade in the present.
FRONT COVER: NATALY LEE, SNARM (DETAIL), 2025, DIGITAL PHOTOGRAPH.
