ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the use of arts within attempts to redress and remember experiences of the regime, with a particular focus on the varying participatory and educational methods employed therein. It focuses on post-genocide Cambodia as an instructive and unique case, where a history of state-sponsored commemorative and memorial activity that has made claim over the experience of the Khmer Rouge regime constrains and obliges the forms of artistic practice at work. The chapter reviews state-sponsored arts-based initiatives deployed through the 1980s that sought recourse to coercive forms of ‘participation’ in the name of ‘national reconciliation’. In the years prior to the establishment of the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia in 2006, Non-Governmental Organisations mobilised a range of arts-based approaches in anticipation of the work of the court, particularly as a means of ‘translating’ and communicating legal knowledge to a public audience.
