Join us for a lecture/artist talk with artist Samboleap Tol .Tol’s artworks are heavily inspired by indigenist animist offering practices from Cambodia and the wider Southeast Asian region. Ancestral veneration practices became important to her as a way to directly connect with her ancestors, whom she feels estranged from due to postcolonial displacement and brutality.

In this lecture, Tol will delve deeper into the religious, historical, and political contexts of these offering practices, lightly touching upon (Indic) temple and inscription culture, and musing on their syncretism.She will bring two manuscripts, obtained via Western auctions: a Khmer smot book (death poetry which is sung) and a Pustaha, a Batak document for magic spells, to speak more in depth about the link between indigenous practices and vernacular manuscripts.

Tol says: “I consider these vernacular manuscripts as sitting at the intersections of religion, ancestral veneration, and artistic expression. It's incredible how these manuscripts can give us a window into our ancestors' worlds: a moment where they seem to be pondering life.”