ROH is excited to return to the Emergence sector of Art Basel Paris 2025, presenting works by Tith Kanitha (b. 1987, Phnom Penh, Cambodia; lives and works in Phnom Penh). Working across sculpture, installation, performance, video, and works on paper, Tith is also active in Cambodia's burgeoning independent cinema industry as an actor, director, and artistic director, closely affiliated with the award-winning film production company Anti-Archive.
In 2022, Tith became the first Cambodian artist invited to show at the prestigious Carnegie International in its 126-year history. Her practice offers a nuanced negotiation of uncertainty and freedom—concepts deeply pertinent to Cambodia, where the devastation of the Khmer Rouge (Pol Pot's agrarian communist extremist rule, during which approximately 2 million Cambodians were killed from 1975 to 1979) remains embedded in its landscape and collective memory. While her works manifest an enigmatic formal abstraction, they engage with this history through a personal and processual negotiation with inherited memories that continue to shape both public life and private experience.
Central to Kanitha's practice is a distinctive material methodology: the laborious process of coiling steel wire around a thin rod until it resembles the spring of a ballpoint pen. This intuitive engagement with material properties, textural variations, chromatic relationships, and spatial dynamics has become a key through which the artist untangles questions about existence, war, intersubjective relationships, and political formations. The resulting sculptural forms possess a unique kinetic potentiality: stretching, compressing, and interlocking in configurations that challenge normative conceptions of sculptural presence.
Describing her relationship to abstraction in a 2022 interview with art historian Roger Nelson, she observed: "I feel that I don't own the 'abstract' as a word and its meanings or the history of where it comes from. But I can own abstraction in my own experiences and in the love that I have for it. And through feelings that remain from one generation to another, from past to present and to the future, from time to space and from space to time." Keenly aware of abstraction's contested genealogies, she reasserts her agency to reclaim and reconfigure it through embodied experiences and affective investments.
The presentation includes drawings created since 2021, in which Kanitha uses wire sculptures as brushes, drawing them softly across large sheets of paper in gestural explorations that record the friction between rigid metallic structures and yielding paper surfaces. Complementing these are intimate watercolour works—an ongoing life practice exploring water's transformative role and fluidity.
This multifaceted practice speaks to the multiplicity of creative expression that Tith eloquently navigates. Some moments require the steadfast determination of wire-working, while others call for the gentle acceptance of watercolour's flow. Through her varied output, Tith constructs a visual language acknowledging the full spectrum of human experience—from joy to sadness to confusion—while suggesting that these states are unfixed and part of a larger, continuous process of becoming.
ROH
Tith Kanitha
Living in Coiled Time
Art Basel Paris 2025
Emergence Sector
Booth M44
Grand Palais
Avenue Winston Churchill,
75008 Paris, France
VIP First Choice
22 October, 10:00 - 20:00
VIP Preview
22 October, 16:00 - 20:00
VIP First Choice, Preview, and One-Day VIP Cardholders
23 October, 11:00 - 14:00
Vernissage
23 October, 14:00 - 18:00
Public Days
24 - 26 October, 11:00 - 19:00
ARTIST
Born 1987, Phnom Penh, Cambodia
Lives and works in Phnom Penh, Cambodia
Tith Kanitha’s art practice engages with laborious, meditative and repetitive processes in pursuit of a feeling of freedom. She works across several artistic media, making sculptures, installations, performances, videos, and works on paper. Tith often draws on personal experiences, as well as the collective memory of Cambodia’s troubled modern history, translating these complex issues into a gentle language of organic abstraction.
Tith is also active in Cambodia’s burgeoning independent cinema industry as an actor, director, and artistic director, closely affiliated with the award-winning film production company Anti-Archive. She graduated with a degree in interior design from the Royal University of Fine Arts in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, shifting focus to artistic practice after discovering the sense of freedom that comes with using daily objects to make artworks.
Tith has exhibited at prestigious exhibitions in Cambodia, Southeast Asia and internationally. In 2022, she contributed a large installation comprising of sculptures and works on paper that was exhibited in the 58th Carnegie International, curated by Sohrab Mohebbi; Tith was the first artist from Cambodia to join this prestigious biennial exhibition in its 126-year history. Also in 2022, she exhibited a substantial body of work in the 11th Singapore Biennale. She has shown work at Mori Art Museum (Tokyo), ifa (Berlin and Stuttgart), French Cultural Center (Phnom Penh), and SA SA BASSAC (Phnom Penh), and many other venues. Tith’s work is held in several prominent private and public collections internationally, including at Singapore Art Museum, and has been critically acclaimed in specialist art publications including Artforum. She has undertaken residencies at the Rijksakademie (Amsterdam), Bose Pacia (New York), Arts Initiative Tokyo (Tokyo), and SA SA BASSAC (Phnom Penh), among others.