PHNOM PENH: More than 50 artists, creators and photographers from Cambodia, South-East Asia and beyond are bringing together art, ancestral knowledge, environmental thinking and emerging technology to explore what resilience could mean for Cambodia’s future.
Their works will be presented in “Ponleu: An Ecology of Hope”, a group exhibition opening at Hiroshima House in Phnom Penh on Sept 19, as part of Clean Energy Week, which runs from Sept 15-21.
The exhibition is part of the 2026 season of Solarpunk, a project which seeks to imagine regenerative futures in which people, nature, culture and technology can coexist and develop together.
Rather than treating resilience simply as the ability to endure crises, the participating creators were asked to examine how societies could rethink and rebuild the systems, relationships and knowledge that allow communities to respond to environmental, economic, technological and social change.
“Ponleu: An Ecology of Hope invites us to reimagine regenerative futures for Cambodia and South-East Asia, while asking: How can we reset and reframe what resilience means?” the organisers said.
The exhibition brings together works developed through artist-pairing sessions, an art residency and a regional open call, as well as photographs by Palestinian photographers in Gaza and the West Bank.
At Hiroshima House, the works will be arranged as an interconnected journey through eight stages: Roots, Soil, Decomposition, Mycelium, Resistance, Growth, Flowering and Seeds.
The stages represent questions about what societies inherit and witness, how people respond emotionally and connect with one another, what they resist, what futures they imagine and what they eventually become.
The project began with co-creation sessions at tiSamjort studio in Phnom Penh, where 26 artists met on weekends for brainstorming and creative exercises.
Their discussions examined 11 dimensions of resilience, ranging from energy, infrastructure and livelihoods to environmental protection, community cohesion, cultural identity, psychological wellbeing, governance, technology, justice and intergenerational responsibility.
The artists were also encouraged to consider cognitive resilience in the age of artificial intelligence, including how intuitive, systemic and relational thinking can be maintained as AI becomes increasingly integrated into society.
An open studio event at Life Field TK subsequently invited members of the public to participate, including by painting on 40 solar panels donated by Kamworks. The panels were transformed into canvases and will form part of the exhibition.
Another component took 22 creators outside Phnom Penh for an art residency in Kampong Thom province.
Working with Sambor Village and the Kui Indigenous community of Phum Andas, the participants experienced forests, the ancient temples of Sambor Prei Kuk and local craft villages before producing art that responded to what they had encountered.
The project also extended beyond Cambodia through a regional open call. More than 40 submissions were received, with selected digital works from artists in countries including the Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia, Laos and Vietnam joining pieces produced through the Cambodian sessions.
Cambodian architect and visual artist Sokkim Chork said Solarpunk offered a way to consider technological progress without separating it from people, culture and nature.
He pointed to something as familiar as a bamboo basket, arguing that such traditional objects embody knowledge about materials, climate, techniques, economies and communities.
“The question is how can that knowledge continue into the future?” he said.
For Chork, the future does not necessarily require replacing traditional practices with new technologies. Instead, he suggested exploring how traditional knowledge and emerging technologies could learn from one another.
Cambodian architect Priik Soeurnsaksith similarly described Solarpunk as a hopeful vision in which technology, nature and communities exist in harmony.
“It is about creating sustainable systems, valuing local knowledge, and using creativity to address environmental challenges,” he said.
Cambodian engineer and creative maker Kong Sovansakana said environmental sustainability should not be considered a constraint on innovation, but rather a potential source of it.
For him, the “punk” element of Solarpunk represents a rejection of pessimism and the idea that communities must wait for centralised institutions to solve every problem.
“It’s building the alternative directly, instead of waiting for permission,” he said.
Angeliza, a Cambodian illustrator based in the US, described the initiative from a more personal perspective, saying it provides young people with a community where they can connect with others while confronting uncertainty about the future.
“A lot of things in the world are out of our control, but that does not mean we shouldn’t stop trying to fight for a better outcome,” she said.
The Sept 19 programme will extend beyond visual art.
Activities begin at 1.30pm at F3 – Friends Future Factory with “Chakkhok”, a parallel exhibition by Limkokwing University students examining blindness and accessibility.
At 4pm, participants will cross to Wat Ounalom and Hiroshima House, where the Solarpunk exhibition will open with an Ayai performance and a “deep time” walking meditation.
The performance, Ayai Chang Krom Chet, will involve children from Hiroshima House’s community school, Neang SouSou and traditional Cambodian musicians. It will trace the Earth’s formation over more than 4.5 billion years before turning to contemporary environmental challenges and questions about humanity’s response to them.
At 6pm, students from the Department of Media and Communication at the Royal University of Phnom Penh will screen three short documentaries produced in partnership with EnergyLab.
The documentaries seek to show the human impact of the clean-energy transition, focusing on farmers managing energy access while improving their value chains, households using clean cooking solutions to reduce smoke exposure and heat stress, and a women-led Cambodian business transforming agricultural waste into clean energy and biofertiliser.
Poetry performances will follow, before the evening concludes with Tonlé Pulse, a musical project combining Cambodian traditional instruments and rhythms with ambient and experimental electronic sounds.
The group emerged from an earlier Solarpunk season and describes its music as a bridge between Cambodia’s past and a possible future sound of Phnom Penh.
The exhibition is curated by Cambodian photographer Tytaart, with support from digital artist Khy and community organiser Miguel Jeronimo.
The initiative will continue throughout Clean Energy Week through The Solar Hub at Friends Future Factory. Running each evening from Sept 15-21, the space will host conversations, screenings, drawing and writing activities, presentations and discussions centred on resilience and possible Solarpunk futures.
Activities include a screening of Roots, a short film focusing on the Kui Indigenous community and resilient ancestral practices, as well as discussions about the concept of the commons and a zine-making workshop.
Solarpunk is supported by HBS Cambodia as part of Clean Energy Week by EnergyLab Asia, in collaboration with Seapunk Studios, Microgalleries, Sambor Village, Life Field, tiSamjort studio, Hiroshima House, F3 and Kamworks.
Through the exhibition and related activities, organisers hope to move discussion of resilience beyond surviving disruption towards examining how communities can regenerate and adapt while maintaining connections to culture, place and one another.
At the heart of the project is a question that runs through the artists’ work: whether Cambodia’s future needs to choose between tradition and technological progress, or whether the two can instead evolve together. - The Phnom Penh Post/ANN
