Select Exhibitions + Installations

Year Title
2022 Waiting for Enlightenment
2022 Two Hearts
2021 Losing My Religion
2020 if we want it
2017 Holiday in Cambodia
2017 A single journey can change the course of a life
2016 Idol/Idle

INDEX /Archive

Waiting for Enlightenment
រង់ចាំចូលនិព្វាន

Distillery Gallery (Boston, MA)
Curated by Shane Levi

June 1 – July 9, 2022

(Catalog)

INSTALLATION VIEWS

រង់ចាំចូលនិព្វាន Waiting for Enlightenment, Distillery Gallery, Boston, 2022. (Credit: Mel Taing)

Time is played by a serpent in Sopheak Sam’s first solo exhibition, Waiting for Enlightenment. Traversing picture planes and video screens, the serpent emerges as a multidimensional being — demonized as an agent of ruin or pillaged for pleasure, but never permitted a peaceful journey toward transformation or enlightenment.

Comprising drawings, paintings, artist books, and video, Sam’s work traces cultural hybridity, queer futurity, religious iconography, and the fraught political history between the United States and Cambodia. Born a child refugee in the aftermath of the Cambodian genocide, Sam positions the exhibition as an embodied site for individual and collective searching. Crawling out of an existential fever dream, the serpent becomes an avatar cruising through liminal spaces of belonging, spirituality, and utopia — birthed again and again through cycles of displacement, loss, and love.

SOPHEAK SAM

Exhibitions News About

← Index