You Are From My Past Life ពីអតីតជាតិ marks the first international solo exhibition of Cambodian-American artist Sopheak Sam.

Featuring a new body of intimate works created specifically for MoM Gallery, Sam distills memories that are not their own but felt through inheritance. The artist appropriates personal family photographs from Khao-I-Dang refugee camp (opened 1979 through 1993) in Sa Kaeo province, Thailand, to reorient visitors to a time and place forgotten yet calls to mind in Northern Thailand (since the mid-1970s, Thailand has hosted more than 1 million refugees from the region. Some 90,000 Myanmar refugees are currently living in nine camps along the Thailand-Myanmar border ).

The exhibition considers sites of return and reincarnation, embodiment and immateriality, ground and mobility, as well as the fleeting spectrality of post-war hauntings. Bodies and symbols emerge while simultaneously obscured — colliding histories and renegotiating belonging. What happens when we go back to where our bodies came from? Across oceans and borders, the artist invites viewers to re-conceptualize “home” as a vanishing point beyond the horizon.

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About the artist

Sopheak Sam (b. 1989 in Thailand; lives and works in the United States) is a multi-disciplinary Cambodian-American artist exploring affect from postwar intimacies. Their process draws on historic and aesthetic materiality to trouble the ways in which we memorialize the past. Often tracing how queerness resurfaces in Khmer subjecthood, their work is a sensuous and often spatial intervention of desire and memory. Sam was the recipient of an American Fulbright Research Grant to Thailand from 2022 to ’23 in which they returned to Khao-I-Dang refugee camp for the first time during that period. Sam holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in Studio for Interrelated Media from MassArt, and is currently completing their graduate studies at Cornell University. They grew up in Massachusetts and are the second-youngest of nine siblings.