Khvay Samnang: Spirit, Body, and Land — The land as body, the body as memory.

The Institut Français du Cambodge partners with SNA Arts Management to present a major exhibition by one of the country’s most acclaimed contemporary artists. A decade of works, a vision of the world.

Khvay Samnang @SNA

Born in 1982 in Svay Rieng, trained in the painting department at the Royal University of Fine Arts in Phnom Penh, where he graduated in 2006, he has built over two decades a multidisciplinary practice—performance, video, photography, sculpture, installation—in which each gesture seems drawn from the Cambodian الأرض itself. With Spirit, Body, and Land, presented at the Institut Français du Cambodge in partnership with SNA Arts Management, a selection of works created between 2016 and 2026 unfolds across the spaces of the IFC. Ten years of research, field immersion, and dialogue with Indigenous communities. A long-term body of work, finally shown here, on its own soil.

The body as territory

To grasp Khvay Samnang’s universe, one must accept letting go of conventional boundaries between human and non-human, between the visible and the spiritual, between art and ritual. His work is rooted in a deep conviction: colonization and globalization have not only destroyed forests or seized land—they have broken something far more fragile, the connection between individuals and the land that shaped them, between communities and the systems of knowledge that have structured them for centuries.

To explore this rupture and attempt to map its contours, the artist has engaged in a long-term collaboration with local and Indigenous communities in Cambodia—particularly the Chong, an animist people established for more than six hundred years in the Cardamom Mountains in the southwest of the country. From these immersions emerge objects: masks woven from vines and raw materials, organic costumes, hybrid sculptures combining natural and industrial elements. These are not representations—they are presences.

Counter-mapping and ecological urgency

Spirit, Body, and Land is structured around a gesture that Khvay Samnang himself calls “counter-mapping”: opposing official maps, land demarcations, and borders drawn by economic powers with another geography—living and spiritual—traced by bodies, rituals, and stories passed down through generations.

The video works at the heart of the exhibition document performances within natural landscapes—rivers, forests, contested lands. The artist or his dancer-collaborators immerse themselves literally in the elements: mud, water, bark, rock. These bodies, twisting, coiling, burying themselves, do not seek spectacle; they trace through movement a map no land registry can reproduce. They embody animist beliefs, political concerns, relationships between animals, humans, and non-human life forms—and the healing power of plants.

All of this unfolds within a context of ecological and geopolitical urgency that the artist has continually examined: resource overexploitation, ecosystem collapse, increasing climate instability. Universal themes, refracted through the singular lens of Cambodian experience.

An artist rooted in his time

What distinguishes Khvay Samnang from many engaged artists is the depth of his grounding in reality. He does not work from a studio, but from the field. He spends time with the communities he documents, learning their practices, languages, and mythologies. His creative process is shaped by the environments he moves through—the work emerges from encounter, never from distance.

This commitment extends beyond the studio: co-founder of Sa Sa Art Projects (2010–2024) and SA SA BASSAC (2011–2018), two non-profit spaces that became essential hubs for experimental art in Phnom Penh, he has also transmitted his practice to a generation of emerging Cambodian artists. A collective work, therefore, as much as a personal one.

On the international stage, his trajectory is notable: Jeu de Paume in Paris, CAPC in Bordeaux, Haus der Kunst in Munich, Tramway in Glasgow, documenta 14 and 15 in Kassel, the Venice Biennale in 2024 as an official collateral event, the National Museum of Art in Osaka in 2025. Spirit, Body, and Land at the IFC fits within this trajectory—but with an added dimension: that of a return, a direct address to the Cambodian and Francophone public of Phnom Penh.

An exhibition for our time

In a Cambodia undergoing rapid transformations—persistent land pressure, fragile ecosystems, tensions between modernization and the preservation of Indigenous cultures—Khvay Samnang’s work resonates with particular sharpness. It does not offer answers but opens spaces for reflection that only art can create: spaces where we momentarily stop seeing the land as a resource and begin to perceive it as a living being to which we are accountable.

Spirit, Body, and Land is far more than a contemporary art exhibition. It is an act of memory, an invocation, a reminder that certain bonds—between spirit, body, and land—can neither be sold nor erased.

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Practical information

🗓 Opening — Friday, June 26, 2026 at 6:30 PM បើកសម្ពោធនៅថ្ងៃសុក្រ ទី ២៦ ខែមិថុនា ម៉ោង ១៨:៣០ល្ងាច

🗓 Exhibition — From June 26 to September 26, 2026

📍 Institut Français du Cambodge, Phnom Penh

In partnership with SNA Arts Management

Free entry upon registration — http://ifcambodge.com