Prak Dalin

Evocative materiality, lyrical forms
By Mary Ann Lim

(From left to right) Prak Dalin, Grey Land, 2024, cement and steel round bar; Prak Dalin, Ascension, 2024, cement and steel pipe; Prak Dalin, Embodied of Brick, 2024, brick. Installation view of NomadiX Art Tour exhibition at Hiroshima House, Phnom Penh. 

A striking feature of Prak Dalin’s work is her assemblage of simple industrial materials that pare urban landscapes down to their affectual kernels. Bricks are stacked to form organic, human-like silhouettes, and the repetition of steel cylinders invokes a sense of rhythm. Wood slabs provide comfort and warmth, while cement is calcified into hefty shapes that can function as solid foundations, bonding substance, or perilously perched to signal precarity. These materials are also used as tools to mediate encounters with the natural environment, exploring complex relationships between rapid urban development, and the communities that congeal around, or are alienated by these spaces.

This economy of medium and form reflects Dalin’s formal training in architecture against the backdrop of an increasingly post-industrial Cambodia. Born in 1996, she graduated from the Royal University of Fine Arts in 2019. During her studies, she also took a contemporary art class taught by artist Khvay Samnang at Sa Sa Art Projects in 2018, where her architectural practice took on an artistic turn. Since then, she has exhibited both locally and internationally, across spaces such as SNA Arts Gallery (Phnom Penh), MAIELIE (Thailand), Haus der Statistik (Berlin), and 16albermarle Project Space (Sydney). She was also one of twelve recipients for the 2024 Maybank Fellowship Artist Fellowship Programme, and is currently on a residency with tiSamjort in conjunction with the Royal Holloway University of London research project, THINK DEEP: Novel Creative Approaches to the Subsurface.

Prak Dalin, Merge, 2020, concrete, debar, gravel, installation view at the Pisaot Artist-in-Residence Open Studio, Sa Sa Art Projects, Phnom Penh.

Her architectural instincts appear most significantly in the precision of her structures, reminiscent of scaffolding or technical drafts. In Lyrical Construct (2024), Dalin reconstructs the Sihanoukville train station using round and thin steel bars. Austere metal is transmuted into the appearance of drawn lines, taking on organic qualities. The familiarity of the building’s outline elicits reimaginations of the space through memory, history, and personal encounters of the everyday. On the other hand, Dalin deftly juxtaposes wood with the same steel bars to emphasise hostile architectures in Go Together, her series of works in the Shaking Land and Water group show at Jendela, Esplanade in Singapore (2022). Here, she reenacts the grids and casts of construction scaffolds, systematically isolating the harsh consequences of economic policies on local communities.

Communal relationships to land and human dominance over nature are also recurring themes in Dalin’s works. Merge 1, presented at her Sa Sa Art Projects Open Studio in 2020, features a spine of metal debars twisted around a body of concrete moulded to the shape of Cambodia. Merge 2 and Merge 3 similarly appropriate debars into man-made edifices that are placed over sand or suspended in the air. The debars’ unsettling intrusions into the surroundings and different elements allude to the invasive nature of unbridled progress, and the desire for power over the environment. Dalin’s practice has taken a softer shift in recent times however, focusing on rural life and its keen attenuations to nature. Familiar motifs of environmental destruction are reified in her recent presentation, Assemblage, as part of her residency with tiSamjort. Yet simultaneously, the usual industrial materials are interwoven with fragile components like silk and charcoal. These quiet gestures contemplate on the intangible links that bind people to the places they inhabit, connecting to memory, history, and stories that hopefully endure beyond the tides of time and change.

Click here to read our dialogue with Prak Dalin, where she discusses her residency with tiSamjort, her collaboration with NomadiX, and her 2021 solo exhibition Imagine Material at Sa Sa Art Projects.