Band Item: Angkor – An Essay On Art and Imperialism

…our current exhibition “On Attachments and Unknowns”: a Reading Group based on artist Sutthirat Supaparinya’s (Som) ongoing restricted books project that considers attempts across the Asia Pacific region to systematically eliminate singular voices. For “On Attachments and Unknowns”, Som takes as her subject a book with current personal resonance, living as an artist under military rule: “Angkor: An Essay on Art and Imperialism” written by Jan Myrdal with black and white photographs by Gun Kessle. First published in Swedish in 1968, it was translated into Thai by Charnvit Kasetsiri and banned in Thailand from 1976 – 1998. As far as we know, the book was never translated into Khmer, and never banned in Cambodia under any regime. In the exhibition, Som both enables and renounces the legibility of the book, with the Thai translation physically bound in the exhibition and the English copy offered for reading in our library.