Great Hall Exhibition Series Fall 2026
About the Exhibition
The Institute of Fine Arts is pleased to announce ស្ដាប់មិនជាក់ កុំអាលញាក់ចិញ្ចើម Journey into Clarity, a solo exhibition featuring new work by artist Tith Kanitha (b. 1987, lives and works in Phnom Penh, Cambodia). The Institute’s Fall 2026 iteration proudly continues the Great Hall Exhibition series’ engagement with extraordinary women artists and will be Tith’s first solo institutional presentation in the United States and her New York debut. ស្ដាប់មិនជាក់ កុំអាលញាក់ចិញ្ចើម Journey into Clarity will feature Tith’s celebrated organic sculptural forms in The James B. Duke House’s Marica Vilcek Great Hall. In her practice, Tith coils steel wire by hand around a thin copper steel rod and shapes the malleable lengths into porous abstractions that oscillate between line and mass. Each sculpture, made without preparatory drawings, takes shape through patient, iterative gestures. Slow and methodical, her embodied technique is a meditation on Cambodia’s past and present, refusing to resolve the questions that history leaves open.
Tith’s sculptural process is one part of a multifaceted practice that moves between film, installation, performance, and works on paper. Across these mediums, she attends to the specificities of site and issues of ecology amid shifting urban conditions, such as the ongoing land grab around Phnom Penh’s Boeung Kak Lake. For her renowned installation Hut Tep Soda Chan (Hut of an Angel, 2011/2017)—itself titled in homage to a 1968 Khmer film—Tith contemplates the domestic environments of the residents displaced from the lake shore. The work features the artist’s personal belongings alongside those of her parents and neighbors and was first presented in her own home, with later iterations in museum spaces. Her 2014 experimental short, Boding, focuses on The White Building, a longtime artists’ residence demolished in 2017. Both works reflect the artist’s engagement with the volatile commercial redevelopment of Phnom Penh through the experience of the community it uproots.
The erasures Tith considers are also those of Cambodia’s deeper past and collective memory. Born after the Khmer Rouge (1975–79), she contends with that history and its gaps without supplying the fixed vocabularies of trauma and reconstruction that globalized contemporary art audiences have come to expect. For Tith, the gesture of binding wire is a way to tangle and disentangle questions that cannot be voiced directly and to hold memories handed down by previous generations, many of them fragmentary or unspoken. Her forms exist in cyclical rather than linear time, a feature that reflects her interest in Cambodian syncretic traditions of Buddhism and animism. Within the Great Hall’s Beaux-Arts interior, the sculptures will hang in loose vertical registers, allowing light to pass through and shadows to shift. They yield no single vantage and settle no questions. A piece is finished, in the artist's words, when “it can breathe on its own.”
This exhibition was made possible through the generous support of Valeria NapoleoneXX.
Additional support provided by The Institutum and Joy L. Wang.
We extend special thanks to the artist, Tith Kanitha. Jennifer Byun, Shreya Dwibedy, Alicia Lee, Phoebe More, Lilia Muscarella, Zia Pao-Ziegler, Daisy Ryan, and Janice Zhai curated the exhibition. Thanks also to Joan Kee, Catherine Quan Damman, Jason Dubs, Sarah Higby, Nadia Rivers, Lisa McGhie, as well as many other IFA faculty and staff for their support. Jason Varone designed the website.
About the Institute of Fine Arts at NYU
Since 1932, The Institute of Fine Arts has been dedicated to graduate teaching and advanced research in the history of art, archaeology, curation, and conservation. The Great Hall Exhibition was formed as a student-led coalition in 2013 with a focus on presenting contemporary art in the Duke House’s Beaux-Arts interior. Acclaimed artists Lynda Benglis, Rachel Harrison, Elaine Lustig-Cohen, Amy Yao, Lucy Kim, Xaviera Simmons, Cauleen Smith, Maia Ruth Lee, Rose Salane, and Acaye Kerunen are among those featured to date.
About ValeriaNapoleoneXX
ValeriaNapoleoneXX is an umbrella platform for projects and initiatives working towards increasing the recognition and validation of art practices by women artists through collaborations and partnerships with institutions and individuals in the world of contemporary art.
About ValeriaNapoleoneXXIFA
ValeriaNapoleoneXXIFA is an ongoing commitment to underwrite the Great Hall Exhibition Series at NYU’s Institute of Fine Arts, focused on the work of women artists.