Aurélie Fischer, a Photographer in Residence in Kep to Capture the Rainy Season

Since 6 July, Belgian photographer Aurélie Fischer has been staying at Knai Bang Chatt, in Kep, for a one-month residency organised by Art for Kep. Through the monsoon season, she explores the connections between landscape, labour and identity.

Aurélie Fischer

A Month in Kep to Capture the Monsoon

Art for Kep, the artist residency programme at Knai Bang Chatt, in Kep, welcomes a new arrival this week. Aurélie Fischer, a Belgian photographer who has lived in Southeast Asia for several years, is settling in the coastal town for a month with a clear goal: to build a body of images around the Cambodian monsoon, somewhere between documentary observation and visual poetry.

Her project in Kep is built around reflections, silhouettes, gestures and the particular light the rainy season brings. Rather than photographing the monsoon as a simple weather phenomenon, she intends to immerse herself in local communities to explore what this climate shapes: the rhythms of work, repeated gestures, the memory of a landscape moulded by water. For her, landscape is never neutral: it carries the traces of those who inhabit and work it.

A Vision Already Shaped by Cambodia

This isn't the first time Aurélie Fischer has turned her lens on Cambodia. Originally trained as an educator, she moved into photography after several years of travel across Asia, including a long stay in India, at Auroville, where she worked for two years as a photographer for the community's art service. There, she documented families from the local Gypsy community, work that already hinted at her interest in gestures and faces at the margins of the bigger narratives.

After settling in Cambodia, she devoted an entire series to the temples of Angkor during the Covid period, when the site, emptied of tourists, opened itself to her in rare silence. These images, steeped in spirituality and solitude, have since travelled through several exhibitions, including one in February 2025 in Kep itself, at the Art Bar run by Marie Vol's gallery, where audiences had already discovered her vision of emptiness and light. Her work is regularly associated with the Photo Phnom Penh festival, a major event for photography in Southeast Asia.

The Kampot salt fields are no strangers to her either. In January 2025, she had already presented « Reflection: Between Illusion and Reality », an exhibition of around twenty photographs at the Topaz TheCommune restaurant in Phnom Penh, built entirely around this same region. The prints, displayed upside down to bring out the reflection of shapes and colours on the water's surface, staged simple gestures of salt work, captured at the hours when coastal light turns most distinctive.

Aurélie Fischer in front of one of her works, at the « Reflection: Between Illusion and Reality » exhibition at Topaz TheCommune

The month-long residency in Kep is therefore a continuation of a dialogue already begun between the artist and this part of the Cambodian coast, this time with a broader brief: to move beyond temples and towards people, and to make the monsoon a common thread running through landscape, labour and identity.

Art for Kep, a Through-Line of Artists in Residence

Launched by Knai Bang Chatt, Art for Kep has for several seasons invited artists in residence to come and work in this coastal setting, between the sea, Bokor hill and the remains of colonial-era villas. The programme has already welcomed creators with very different practices, from photographer Shanghai Chang to dancer Alina Mehood, as well as Emmanuel Pézard and James Speck, each invited to produce an original body of work in response to the territory. By opening its doors to Aurélie Fischer, Art for Kep continues that same ambition: to make Kep a place of creation in its own right, not merely a backdrop for passing artists.

The work resulting from this residency will be presented in the coming weeks, notably on Knai Bang Chatt's and Art for Kep's communication channels.