Cambodian contemporary artist Tith Kanitha has returned to exhibit in her home country with Cycle of Life, a major solo exhibition at Sna Arts Management, marking her first solo presentation in Cambodia in eight years.
Running from January 16 to March 14, the exhibition brings together works created between 2007 and 2025, spanning video, sculpture, painting and works on paper.
Presented across three storeys of the gallery, Cycle of Life traces Kanitha’s long-term engagement with time, memory, labour and the Buddhist concept of vat sangsa — the cyclical nature of existence encompassing life, death and rebirth.
“The space contains the time,” Kanitha notes in the exhibition text, a statement that underpins the show’s refusal of linear narratives.
Instead, the exhibition moves back and forth across decades of artistic production, revisiting early collage works from 2007 alongside recent hand-coiled steel sculptures completed in 2025.
“Presenting across the three storeys of a homegrown gallery, the exhibition gathers a range of screen, paint, and steel pieces, coalescing abstract forms with temporal disjunctures,” said Kanitha.
“The show features old and new works, drawing on Cambodia’s historical and spatial lineages to open pathways toward infinity.”
At the heart of the exhibition is Boding (2015), a video work filmed inside Phnom Penh’s White Building three years before its demolition.
Once a symbol of Cambodia’s post-independence modernism, the building was razed in 2017 after residents were relocated.
Shot as if through the gaze of a visitor from the afterlife, Boding immerses viewers in dark corridors accompanied by a droning soundscape, evoking loss, displacement and the fragility of memory in a rapidly changing city.
Other works draw on Cambodia’s cultural and historical layers, incorporating lyrics from Sinn Sisamouth and Ros Sereysothea scrawled across gallery walls, while abstract paintings and watercolours dissolve clear lines and fixed forms.
Earth-toned papers, graphite and acrylic blend into one another, mirroring both personal evolution and broader national transformations.
The exhibition culminates on the top floor with steel wire sculptures that appear to writhe and breathe within the space.
Created through hours of repetitive hand-coiling, the works reflect Kanitha’s view of labour as meditation.
Natural light floods one section of the room, while another remains enclosed, underscoring the tension between exposure and containment — a recurring theme throughout the show.
Kanitha, born in Phnom Penh in 1987, has built an international career over the past decade, participating in major exhibitions including the Singapore Biennale, Busan Biennale and the 58th Carnegie International, where she became the first Cambodian artist to be featured.
Despite global recognition, Cycle of Life signals a deliberate return to local histories, belief systems and lived experiences.
Rather than offering clear conclusions, the exhibition leaves viewers suspended within a continuous loop.
As the final gallery space suggests, the cycle neither stops nor accelerates — it simply invites reflection on how beginnings and endings are inseparable.
