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Phnom Penh & Exhibition: ‘Reflections between Illusion and Reality’ at Topaz TheCommune

Jan 134 min read

Updated: Jan 15

Last night, Topaz restaurant TheCommune hosted the opening of the ‘Reflets entre Illusion et Réalité’ exhibition by Belgian photographer Aurélie Fischer.

Aurélie Fischer in front of one of her creations

Some twenty unusual photographs for this exhibition, held in the hushed salons of one of the capital's finest restaurants, Toul Kork. Many of her fellow artists turned out to support the young woman, who patiently took the time to explain her working technique for this series, taken during the Covid crisis.

A region of reflections par excellence, it was in the Kampot salt flats that Aurélie chose to give free rein to her imagination by depicting simple acts of everyday life around the salt flats. Some of the photos required a great deal of preparation with models, while others are more simply moments of life around this place, which takes on quite exceptional colours at sunrise or sunset.

Playing with natural light and its colours is one of the aspects of the artist's vision, who stresses that he ‘doesn't want to have to resort to filters and other technological devices that now make it possible, more and more frequently, to recompose a photo with just a few clicks’.

Another special feature of this unusual series is that the photos are displayed upside down, so as to highlight the particular reflection of light and form in the partially flooded salt marshes.

Explanations from the artist in front of an attentive audience

About Aurélie

Aurélie has long nurtured the dream of becoming a professional photographer. ‘Utopian to the core and tired of a certain pace of life’, she set off in search of different cultures and lifestyles, but also in search of herself.

‘It was with a certain amount of fear that I left behind my little comforts, my family and my friends. Going off on my own and far away! But deep down I felt that realising a dream meant meeting other people with their differences, their difficulties, their riches and their smiles’, she explains, before adding:

‘And it's with a certain pride that I've already come a long way. I've come a long way towards realising my dream of images based on people, emotions and nature.'

Journey, India first

‘September 2019, I take off for India for the 5th time. This time I was away for two months, during which I was able to celebrate a traditional wedding, take part in Kamel's incredible festival and finally share a timeless human experience alongside the Aurovillians’, she recounts.

Aurovillians are the inhabitants of Auroville, an experimental town north of Pondicherry in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu. Auroville's vocation is to be ‘a place of universal community life, where men and women learn to live in peace, in perfect harmony, beyond all beliefs, political opinions and nationalities’.

Her incredible journey began when he witnessed the union of an Indian man and a French woman in the colours of the country. It was an extraordinary ceremony ‘combining Bengali traditions and a certain Indian modernity inspired by Western customs, which she describes as an unforgettable spectacle’. After all this excitement, she continued her adventures by train to the Kamel festival.

‘I was delighted to be able to attend such an event, which I already knew would be an exceptionally rich photographic experience.’

Burma and Cambodia

In early November 2020, a photographer friend invited her to join him in Burma to shoot a film in the Kalaw Mountains. After discovering this magnificent country, she decided to come to Cambodia, which was her initiatory journey, the country that inspired her in ‘an illustrated epic adventure’.

‘And it was thanks to discovering an NGO that I began my initiation with my first portraits off the beaten track,’ she says.

It was December 2019, and a long-standing friend invited her to discover his project, an aquaponics farm lost in the Cambodian countryside. At the time, the team on the ground consisted of two Frenchmen, an American and two young Cambodians. She joined them to help them promote their project.

‘In February 2020, all the expatriates left and the pandemic began. I decided to accept a unique invitation: to stay in a Cambodian village at the height of the pandemic’, Aurélie confides. She was the only foreigner in an incredibly different culture.

'One of the girls spoke a little English. There were some small exchanges, but communication was complicated, and I was trying to adapt to this new world day by day’.

It was an authentic experience that she says was a bit like a pilgrimage. And it was at this time that she began to document certain aspects of this Kingdom that fascinates her so much. She then had the opportunity to photograph sporting events such as the Davis Cup, to exhibit several of her collections and now works regularly for the Canada International School in Phnom Penh.