Linda Sok: Reincarnations of an altar cloth

Next date: Saturday, 29 March 2025 | 10:00 AM to Sunday, 22 June 2025 | 04:00 PM

Deities in Temples

‘Linda Sok: Reincarnations of an altar cloth’ presents a selection of works from the ongoing series ‘Deities in Temples’ by Cambodian-Australian artist Linda Sok.  

Delving into the matrilineally handed down practice of Pidan, the ‘Deities in Temples’ series presents re-imaginings of lost, stolen, collected, and destroyed silk weavings. Pidan, a poly-chromatic weft silk weaving tradition, faced near erasure due to the targeted persecution of weavers during the Cambodian Khmer Rouge Regime. This resulted in a scarcity of ancestral weaving knowledge. Through this body of work, Sok engages with decolonial practices and methodologies to reclaim fragments of her Cambodian heritage.

Sok collaborated with family members to produce this body of work, inspired by descriptions written on museum registration cards. Found in the archives of the National Museum of Cambodia, these cards are the only documents verifying the existence of the original weavings. Using both imagination and memory, the colonial practices of cataloguing and record keeping by French archivists are reclaimed by Sok to produce new ways to connect to lost heritage. Drawings, paintings, and sketches by her family were compiled to serve as the foundation for a new visual narrative. Through a deliberate process of construction, deconstruction, and reconstruction, these elements are interwoven to create this body of work.  

‘Reincarnations of an altar cloth’ includes a newly commissioned work which expands the visual narrative of this growing series. For Sok’s Western Sydney-based family and collaborators, ‘Reincarnations of an altar cloth’ is the first opportunity to experience a grouping of the works in material form. Sok would like to thank her mother, father, aunts, uncle, and sisters for their contributions to this project.  

Artist bio

Linda Sok’s practice is rooted in her Cambodian cultural heritage. She considers her upbringing in Australia as a fracture through which she can begin to unwind and untangle personal and historical traumas. Distance and absence become inciting moments through which her practice can emerge as acts of weaving, rituals, and material translations. By positioning memory, historical and personal stories, speculations, and the imagination as equally reliable archives, she hopes to blur the lines between fact and fiction; to leave space to allow for the questioning of authority and authenticity inside the logic of colonisation. Materials such as silk, salt, sand, dye, and air-dry clay feature prominently throughout her sculptural, fiber-based practice.   

Sok has exhibited extensively throughout institutions in Australia, North America, Europe, and South East Asia, including the Textile Art Center (NY, USA), Center for Craft (NC, USA), Artspace (NSW, Australia), Institute of Modern Art (QLD, Australia), Gertrude Contemporary (VIC, Australia), Maloop (PHN, Cambodia) and University of Copenhagen (CPH, Denmark). In 2024 she was awarded the Monash Room Emerging Artist Prize from the Australian Consulate in New York, and the Dorner Prize through the RISD Museum in Providence, RI. She graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of New South Wales Art & Design with First Class Honours and the University Medal in Fine Arts. Linda is currently completing her MFA in Sculpture from the Rhode Island School of Design and will be in residence at BEMIS Center for Contemporary Arts, Nebraska, USA in 2025.  

When

  • Saturday, 29 March 2025 | 10:00 AM - Sunday, 22 June 2025 | 04:00 PM

Location

Campbelltown Arts Centre, 1 Art Gallery Rd, Campbelltown, 2560, View Map

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