Pithi: Objects of Ceremony is an exhibition that I co-curated with the National Museum of Cambodia, with support from the Ministry of Culture and Fine Arts, OCIC, and Edenbridge Asia.

The exhibition brings together a selection of Khmer objects made for use in ceremony, including instruments, conches, jewellery, and ritual implements. These are objects that were sounded, worn, and handled within moments of gathering, belief, and shared cultural practice.

In developing the exhibition, I was interested in how these objects functioned within ceremony. Sound, adornment, and ritual are not separate categories, but interconnected parts of a larger system. Sound calls and gathers. Adornment prepares and marks the body. Ritual objects structure and guide ceremonial acts.

Many of these works were removed from temple sites and ritual contexts and later entered collections overseas. In this process, they were separated not only from place, but from the practices that once gave them meaning. Their return raises questions about what it means for these objects to come back, not only physically, but culturally.

This project shifts attention from form to function. It considers how these objects once operated within lived practice, and how they are encountered now in a different context, as museum objects, as returned works, and as part of an ongoing process of cultural recovery.

This was the first time these objects were presented to the public since their return. For me, the exhibition was also about creating a space for reconnection, with history, with cultural knowledge, and with the role of ceremony as something that continues to exist in the present