Linda Sok: Warped Archive

Historically, Cambodian women created large silk pictorial tapestries, known as pidans, for Buddhist temples, using jewel-tones and cosmic, spirit, and animal imagery. But the Khmer Rouge, a totalitarian regime that killed a third of Cambodia’s population in the 1970s, persecuted weavers and destroyed their work. Despite contemporary efforts to resuscitate the matrilineal craft, examples and knowledge of this resist-dyeing and ikat tradition have been largely lost. 

Australian-Cambodian artist Linda Sok engages with French-colonial documentation of disappeared textiles at the National Museum of Cambodia. From these archival descriptions, Sok and her extended family imagine new designs for contemporary tapestries. Sok creates weavings that explore the tender tension between history and imagination and that pose the question: What might be gleaned or remade from a warped archive? The collaborative works are not recreations, but reincarnations of an enduring and now diasporic textile tradition.

What does it mean for a work to be “lost”? Destroyed by government forces, stolen via colonial plundering, misplaced in museum storage, used until threadbare and disintegrating—there are many ways for an object to disappear. Likewise, all inherited historical material reflects some kind of warp, whether through subjective perspectives, intentional erasure, or physical decay. 

Saidiya Hartman, a Columbia University scholar of African American literature and cultural history, presents the concept of “critical fabulation,” a method of combining historical information with creative storytelling to address gaps in the archive. Sok and her family are arguably engaging in this process, but unlike Hartman, who counters the silences of history via writing, Sok creates tangible objects as they might have been, never were, and are today. Working with a warped—and inevitably incomplete—archive, Sok rewrites and expands the narrative of pidan textiles. 

— Emily Alesandrini, curator

My practice is rooted in my Cambodian heritage and considers my upbringing in Australia as a fracture through which I can begin to unwind and untangle personal and historical traumas. Distance and absence become inciting moments; my practice emerges as acts of weaving, rituals, and translations of physical materials. By positioning memory, historical and personal stories, speculations, and the imagination as equally reliable archives, I hope to blur the lines between fact and fiction and open up space for the questioning of authority and authenticity inside the logic of colonization.

I am interested in the idea of a copy of a copy of a copy. I believe that these continuous translations—whether through materials, language, or systems of thought—can allow for concepts to shift and become something that is in a constant state of becoming. Acts of translation invite slippages, where something is always lost but also always gained. Memory, and the process of remembering, can become a process of deconstruction and reconstruction, where new forms and meanings can be made. 

In this destabilization, I seek to subvert the West’s cultural hegemony, particularly as embodied by archives, museums, and colonial records. Isn’t there an alternative to these systems that allows for greater visibility, accountability, and accessibility? Sources of authority like published books and museum collections, policies, and archives become jumping-off points. I speculate and translate my own experience with materials, altering and shifting them into a space that is beyond what they have occupied in the past.

 — Linda Sok

ABOUT THE CURATOR

Emily Alesandrini is a writer, curator, and art historian working in New Orleans and New York. Her research concerns contemporary representations of race and gender with a particular focus on the aesthetics of opacity, ornament, and the diasporic body in art by women and artists of color. She strives to spotlight underrepresented voices in the field and work in community-based collaboration to subvert systems of oppression and erasure within and beyond art history. Alesandrini has contributed to exhibitions and publications at The Studio Museum in Harlem, The Contemporary Arts Center in New Orleans, The Ford Foundation Gallery in New York, The Museum of Sex  in New York, Prospect New Orleans, Wave Hill in the Bronx, and The Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts in New York, as well as Assembly Room Gallery and the 8th Floor. She is the founding editor of Slip magazine and her writing has appeared in ARTnews, The Offing, Burnaway, and BOMB, as well as in numerous exhibition catalogues. 

Alesandrini participated in Burnaway’s 2023 Arts Writing Incubator. She was a 2025 AICA Art Critic Fellow, a 2025 Momus summer resident, and a 2025 Andy Warhol Short Form Art Writing grant winner. Alesandrini graduated from Smith College, earned a master’s degree in art history from Tulane University, and continues her studies as a doctoral student in art history at Bryn Mawr College.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Linda Sok has exhibited her work extensively throughout Australia, North America, Europe, and Southeast Asia, including at the Textile Art Center in New York, the Center for Craft in North Carolina, and, in Australia, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Campbelltown Arts Centre, Murray Art Museum Albany, Artspace, the Institute of Modern Art, and Gertrude Contemporary. Sok also has shown her work in Cambodia and Denmark. 

Her work is held in collections at the Australian War Memorial, the Australian Consulate in New York, and Art Pharmacy. In 2024, she was awarded the Monash Room Emerging Artist Prize by the Australian Consulate in New York and the Dorner Prize through the RISD Museum in Providence, Rhode Island. Sok earned a BFA from the University of New South Wales School of Art & Design in 2018 with First Class Honours and the University Medal in Fine Arts. She completed an MFA in Sculpture at the Rhode Island School of Design in 2025.

RELATED EVENTS

July 11, Saturday, 5 p.m. — Opening of New Exhibits
August 15, Saturday, 5:30 p.m. — Art Talk: Linda Sok

RELATED RESOURCES

Installation Views (coming soon)
Ask the Artist!