Angkor Wat: From Temple to Text

About

Angkor Wat is Cambodia's most famous ancient temple, built in the twelfth century at the height of the Angkorian Empire. Curated by Ashley Thompson, an academic based at Leeds University, Angkor Wat: From Temple to Text features paper ‘casts' of extraordinary inscriptions carved into the stones of the building. Many of the inscriptions were carved in the 16th century, and the casts were made in the 19th century at the initiative of French colonial authorities. The exhibition explores the limits between three and two-dimensional representations. In showing the casts, the display investigates relationships between monument and text, and sculpture and inscription. The exhibition evokes a complex history of cultural reappropriation across centuries and civilisations, and the conflicted inseparable drives for preservation and destruction at work within them.