Soft Monument
Linda Sok
14
August 2019
14
August
2019
6
September 2019
Gallery 2
Soft Monument (2019) is an exhibition that looks to subvert the way the Khmer Rouge Regime has been memorialised in Cambodia. Stupas, large scale monuments erected to memorialise the Khmer Rouge Regime hold the bones of its victims in carelessly stacked mounds. This exhibition contests these sites and instead focuses on the proper memorialisation of the Khmer Rouge’s victims to promote healing amongst survivors and their descendants.The exhibition engages with the materiality of Joss paper, a paper traditionally burnt and used in a Chinese-Cambodian ritual to remember past ancestors. The work softly and subtly hints towards the ongoing trauma caused by the genocide through the use of Joss paper and highlights the absence of the proper treatment of the bodies of Khmer Rouge victims. The space opposes the confrontational sites in Cambodia, which remain tokenistic gestures predominantly catering towards tourists rather than the Cambodian people they are intended for.
Soft Monument (2019) is an exhibition that looks to subvert the way the Khmer Rouge Regime has been memorialised in Cambodia. Stupas, large scale monuments erected to memorialise the Khmer Rouge Regime hold the bones of its victims in carelessly stacked mounds. This exhibition contests these sites and instead focuses on the proper memorialisation of the Khmer Rouge’s victims to promote healing amongst survivors and their descendants.The exhibition engages with the materiality of Joss paper, a paper traditionally burnt and used in a Chinese-Cambodian ritual to remember past ancestors. The work softly and subtly hints towards the ongoing trauma caused by the genocide through the use of Joss paper and highlights the absence of the proper treatment of the bodies of Khmer Rouge victims. The space opposes the confrontational sites in Cambodia, which remain tokenistic gestures predominantly catering towards tourists rather than the Cambodian people they are intended for.
Linda Sok
I am a second-generation descendant of survivors of the Khmer Rouge Regime, a genocidal period in Cambodia’s history which forced my family to flee Cambodia. By accessing fragments of Cambodia's traumatic past, I attempt to recontextualize lost traditions and culture to allow living descendants to process the history through a decolonialized contemporary lens.With careful considerations for cultural objects, rituals, traditions and their materiality, my practice manifests in sculptural installations. I position historical events, cultural objects, personal stories, and my family’s contemporary life, as archives from which I can begin to build a narrative for Cambodia’s and my own past and future.