Review: Uncertain Ground—Personal Histories and Sense of Place
In Uncertain Ground, Linda Sormin creates a world of her own. On view at the Gardiner Museum in Toronto, Ontario, from November 6, 2025, to April 12, 2026, the artist’s first solo exhibition brings together video installation, towering ceramic sculpture, and scattered debris.
Uncertain Ground marks the museum's reopening following extensive renovations. As one walks through the exhibition, it is easy to imagine Sormin engaged in her own kind of reconstruction.
Linda Rotua Sormin: Uncertain Ground, Installation view, Gardiner Museum, November 6, 2025 – April 12, 2026. Photo: Toni Hafkenscheid. COURTESY OF THE GARDINER MUSEUM.
Sormin fills the third-floor gallery with an intricate sculptural web composed of abstract ceramic pieces, shadow puppets, salvaged materials from the museum’s renovations, gold leaf, a fabric lion costume, and projection-based media. Each element contributes to the dense, textured environment, reflecting the physical and visual complexity of the installation. A pathway threads through the maze of objects, guiding visitors toward a central raised platform that evokes a mythic volcanic lake. Through this immersive arrangement, anchored by the ceramic medium, Sormin invites visitors to confront questions of identity, with discoveries unfolding gradually as one walks toward the installation’s centre.
The exhibition is the result of over two decades of experimentation, research, and work. It is informed by the artist’s engagement with her Batak heritage in Sumatra, within the Indonesian archipelago. This connection is evident in the series of pustahas, the accordion-folded bark divination books, that line the platform at the centre of the installation. Sormin’s great-great-grandfather was a datu, a Batak shaman, and a keeper of ancestral knowledge who would have used a pushata in his shamanic practice. However, colonial intervention severed this lineage, removing both the knowledge and the material presence of pustahas from the artist’s family. She explains: “Pustahas hold generations of ancestral knowledge, passed from father to son, until colonizers forbade their use and removed them into private and museum collections across Europe and the U.S. This rupture has shaped my family’s understanding of ourselves.”
Linda Rotua Sormin: Uncertain Ground, Installation view, Gardiner Museum, November 6, 2025 – April 12, 2026. Photo: Toni Hafkenscheid. COURTESY OF THE GARDINER MUSEUM.
Due to this rupture, Sormin did not hold a pustaha during the first two years of her research for Uncertain Ground. It was only when she visited museums in London, Amsterdam, and Paris that she was able to engage directly with a book so integral to her cultural heritage. Sormin hand-copied sections of these pustahas by carving letters and diagrams into clay slabs. What would have been pounded bark for her great-great-grandfather becomes pounded clay in her hands. Into her incised lines, she inlays slip, then scrapes it back to reveal the Batak language. “This process feels like digging toward something that was always my inheritance,” she notes.
Projected on the far wall of the gallery space is an hour-long video made by the artist. The video is scored by the voices of family members speaking in English and Batak, recounting the history of her great-grandfather’s forced hair-cutting by Dutch missionaries. On screen, Sormin includes videos of streams, herself, forestry, clay slip, and tigers. The AI altered images are glitchy visuals with bleeding pixels blending between frames. The datamoshing, while circumventing the technical manual modifications of media compression, builds upon Sormin’s ideas of fragmentation and turmoil.
The artist draws on the myth of Si Boru Deak Parujar. In the Batak myth, the goddess Si Boru Deak Parujar unknowingly awakens an angered dragon, Naga Padoha. Enraged, the dragon wrestles the goddess, resulting in the creation of the world’s landscapes.
Linda Rotua Sormin: Uncertain Ground, Installation view, Gardiner Museum, November 6, 2025 – April 12, 2026. Photo: Toni Hafkenscheid. COURTESY OF THE GARDINER MUSEUM.
The layered visual chaos of the installation responds to this emotive myth, evoking a sense of turbulence, upheaval, and transformation. Small coils of clay are distorted and tangled in piles throughout the exhibition, while large clay beams recall structural steel. Under the artist's manipulation, the beams curve, interrupt, and sprout from one another. The visually heavy material appears to climb upwards in brash, warm colours. Reds, yellows, blues and blacks signal the earth, water, and eruption within the Batak myth.
Sormin engages deeply with both the beauty and disorder of Batak creation mythology, as well as the violence of colonial displacement from this heritage. Where others might turn away, Sormin turns inward, confronting this history head-on. She shares that connecting with the pustahas and the myths found within them “is charged with awe and gratitude at being able to reconnect with a lineage that was interrupted (just now beginning to study the written text alongside fellow artists/researchers in Indonesia), and with grief and anger at the theft and hoarding of this knowledge in European and U.S. collections.”
Throughout the exhibition, myth and reality interact and collide as the work crashes into itself. Sormin’s self-described fragmented practice mirrors the fractured process of identity-formation in diaspora, piecing together the familiar with the unknown, reconciling disparate parts to create something new, singular, and uncertain. In Uncertain Ground, Linda Sormin invites the audience to witness the reconstruction of a history that has long been kept out of her reach.
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We would like to acknowledge funding support from the Ontario Arts Council and the Government of Ontario.
