Image: Brattleboro Museum and Art Center
Linda Sok’s solo exhibition ‘Warped Archive’ is on view at the Brattleboro Museum & Art Center in Brattleboro, Vermont, from 11 July to 1 November 2026. Curated by Emily Alesandrini, it is the ninth solo show by the Australian-Cambodian artist and, according to New England Art News, her first in New England.
The exhibition takes as its starting point the pidan, the large silk pictorial tapestry historically woven by Cambodian women for Buddhist temples. The museum notes that weavers were persecuted and their work destroyed under the Khmer Rouge in the 1970s, and that much of the knowledge of this resist-dyeing and ikat tradition has been lost. Sok works from French-colonial documentation of vanished textiles held at the National Museum of Cambodia, and with her extended family devises new designs from those archival descriptions. Alesandrini’s curatorial text frames the resulting weavings not as recreations but as reincarnations of a now diasporic tradition, and links Sok’s method to Saidiya Hartman’s concept of critical fabulation.
Sok has said she hopes visitors will see weaving as more than a technique for making textiles, describing it as a way of thinking through “memory, history, loss, and migration.” The exhibition title, she has explained, points both to the warp threads on a loom and to the ways archives become distorted and fragmented over time — through family stories, objects in museums, or photographs circulated among relatives. In her own statement for the museum she describes her upbringing in Australia as a fracture through which personal and historical traumas can be unwound, and treats memory and speculation as archives as reliable as documents.
Sok divides her time between Sydney and Providence, Rhode Island. She studied psychology, history and philosophy of science at the University of Sydney, 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, and completed an MFA in sculpture at the Rhode Island School of Design in 2025. Her work has featured in more than fifty exhibitions across Australia, Cambodia, Indonesia, Denmark and the United States, and is held in collections including the Australian War Memorial. Recent Northeast activity includes residencies at the Boston Center for the Arts, the Textile Arts Center and the Lower East Side Print Shop in New York, selection for the New York Foundation for the Arts Immigrant Artist Mentoring Program, and the RISD Museum’s Dorner Prize, awarded in 2024, for which she made a site-specific installation at the museum.
The show was developed collaboratively: Sok and Alesandrini worked largely from photographs before meeting in person on the day of installation, and it is the first time works from different series have been shown together. ‘Warped Archive’ opened on 11 July 2026 alongside the museum’s other summer exhibitions, and a free Art Talk with the artist took place on 15 August. The museum is open Wednesday through Sunday, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., and the exhibition closes on 1 November 2026.
