Member Movie Night: Don’t Think I’ve Forgotten: Cambodia’s Lost Rock and Roll (2014)

A music history told through voices and recordings

The film follows Cambodian popular music from the 1950s through the ’70s and its development into a distinctive rock-and-roll style. Pirozzi builds the account from interviews with musicians who survived, archival material and rare songs, treating performers’ testimony and music as part of the history rather than relying on a conventional live-performance program.

For this Member Movie Night, the announced sequence is remarks followed by the feature. No live-music performance is listed.

Further reading: Member Movie Night | Don’t Think I’ve Forgotten: Cambodia's Lost Rock and Roll (2014) - Calendar - Asian Art Museum ↗

A painting beside the film’s subject

The museum points visitors to Seckon’s Freedom, which depicts singers Ros Serey Sothea and Sinn Sisamouth. It is part of Art from Contemporary Cambodia, an ongoing exhibition in the Tateuchi Gallery featuring work by Seckon and Sopheap Pich.

The exhibition places the artists’ work against Cambodia’s recent history: both were born in the 1970s and lived through the Khmer Rouge genocide, and the museum describes them as important to the country’s artistic revival in the early 2000s. Their approaches differ. Seckon combines photographs, paint and recycled textiles in collages that address the past and present; Pich uses natural materials and discarded objects to make abstract sculptures connected to memory and emotion.

That contrast gives the gallery visit a wider frame than a single painting of musicians. The exhibition considers how contemporary artists work with memory, history and environmental crisis through distinct materials and forms.

Further reading: Member Movie Night | Don’t Think I’ve Forgotten: Cambodia's Lost Rock and Roll (2014) - Calendar - Asian Art Museum ↗ · Art from Contemporary Cambodia - Exhibitions - Asian Art Museum ↗