Met Museum Kicked Me Out for Praying to My Ancestral Gods

via Hyperallergic, 21 March 2023: The Met Museum kicked out Sophiline Cheam-Shapiro for performing a ritual dance and prayed to her ancestral gods in front of looted Cambodian antiquities. The dance was commissioned by the producers of Dynamite Doug.

Whenever I visit museums around the world that house Khmer antiquities, I pray to the gods and ancestors that inhabit them. Sometimes I simply put my hands together and chant. Other times I move. This is my tradition. It is an essential part of my identity and my relationship to these objects. When I visited the Musée Guimet in Paris, I marveled at the size and quality of its collection, which I knew had been taken from Cambodia under French colonial rule. But when I visited museums in the United States, including the Norton Simon, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, I felt at once thrilled to encounter my missing heritage and conflicted by its dislocation from Cambodia. I was largely unfamiliar with how it had arrived in its current situation. I was aware of the problem of looting but thought such prominent museums could never be complicit in these kinds of crimes.

My understanding evolved when I was commissioned to choreograph a dance, performed by Mot Pharan, in celebration of the return of a plundered statue of Phanna Bharamita from the collection of Douglas Latchford in 2021. Pharan performed the dance for a short film by director Ryan Barton, titled Returning Gods (in production). Separately, my university-aged son interned for a summer with the team documenting and organizing the repatriation of looted Khmer antiquities led by the American lawyer Bradley Gordon. (My son is subsequently writing his senior thesis on the value of returning such objects as a form of soft diplomacy.) As a result, I became aware of the wholesale ravaging of my culture’s heritage through an elaborate network of thieves and unscrupulous art dealers, and the complicity of many museums in this illicit trade, including The Met.

In February of 2023, the producers of the podcast series Dynamite Doug, which examines the connection between The Met and the disgraced dealer Douglas Latchford, invited me to participate in a panel discussion in New York City. When they asked me if I’d be willing to dance before the looted antiquities on display at The Met so that they could share a video recording of it during the panel, I agreed, in part, because it was something I’d already done. Ten years earlier, visiting the same gallery on my own, I had taken off my shoes and danced a prayer for the gods that stood on pedestals before me. These are religious objects created by my ancestors for this very purpose.

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