Territorial Altars & Time Travel

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Dominant art historical methods often malfunction when applied to marginalized geographies. The task of considering exhibition histories of Cambodia (1945 tothe present) demands an alterity to modernist notions of exhibition making and contemporary notions of exhibition history making.The plot of linear progress fails, calling for fluid time travel.The present, post-colonial reading might hover around the fact that exhibitions performed hybrid political intentions during a critical era of negotiating nascent Independence (local) with Cold War pressures (global). Within this framework, strategies and aesthetics of display perform the modern, the national, the secular – seemingly heavily co-opting colonial inheritance, whether passively or intentionally. However, distant flashbacks andcrosscuts reveal fecund comparisons that can shake us from the thinhorizon of our momentary perspective. In this case study, time travel presents the lessaccessible past and speculates exhibitions as territorial altars, as sacred as they are secular, as mediums or translators of complex socio-religious-culturalinheritance.