June 10–30, 2016
Performance: Friday, June 10, 6–7:30pm,
Single Break Pot: West 52nd Street, Amy Lee Sanford
Opening: Friday, June 10, 7–9pm
inCube Arts
314 West 52nd St., #1
New York, NY 10019
Hours: Wednesday–Friday noon–6pm,
Saturday noon–5pm
www.incube-arts.org
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Curator: Loredana Pazzini-Paracciani
Artists: Anida Yoeu Ali, Amy Lee Sanford, LinDa Saphan
inCube Arts SPACEis delighted to announce our forthcoming group exhibition curated by Loredana Pazzini-Paracciani, titled INTERLACE: Three Artists in the Cambodian Diaspora. The exhibition includes mixed-media installations, video works and performance, and gathers three female artists from Cambodia/United States. It will run from June 10 through 30, 2016.
Between 1975 and 1985, during and after the Khmer Rouge regime, an estimated one million people fled Cambodia, and over 100,000 Cambodians resettled in the United States, while others took refuge in Canada, Australia and Europe. INTERLACE: Three Artists in the Cambodian Diaspora looks at the artistic practice of Anida Yoeu Ali, Amy Lee Sanford and LinDa Saphan, three female artists of the same generation who grew up as refugees in foreign countries, invested with the dilemma of dealing with issues of hybridity, otherness and displacement. While they continue to negotiate their diasporic positions in their lives, the works featured in the exhibition reveal their migratory past as a significant time of transition. Their artistic journeys, geographically undertaken in disparate parts of the world, come together in this exhibition through a personal yet universal narrative that weaves together motifs of their Cambodian origins with the concerns of all.
On one hand INTERLACE examines Ali, Sanford and Saphan’s fractured memories of their native past to challenge new ways of thinking and acting, and inspire new possibilities. On the other hand the exhibition touches on the role of the woman in Cambodian culture, and unpacks, in the case of Ali’s video works, crucial issues of social and religious identity. In what form do these main threads of thought shape, conceptually and formally, the responses of the three artists to their diasporic condition?
In the floor installation Full Circle, Unbounded Arc, Amy Lee Sanford recomposes the shards of her Cambodian identity through the gesture of breaking and reassembling unglazed Cambodian clay pots, which become the locus of healing after destruction. Sanford will perform Single Break Pot: West 52nd Street on the opening night—in which she will sit on the gallery floor, and break and repair one Cambodian clay pot. LinDa Saphan’s new body of work Back Home compiles delicate paper collages and mixed-media sculptures that trace images of her life from the time she was smuggled across Cambodian borders to her early days in Montreal, Canada, and then New York where the artist currently resides. In the video works from the ”Red Chador” performance series Anida Yoeu Ali, who grew up as a refugee in a traditional Muslim household, dressed in a sparkling red chador, takes the streets of Hartford—where she lived and worked as a visiting professor at Trinity College—to tackle crucial issues of growing Islamophobia in the United States today. The exhibition also features the ongoing performance and video works The Buddhist Bug, part of Ali’s repertoire.
Encompassing a variety of mediums, spanning from video, collage and mixed-media installation, INTERLACE: Three Artists in the Cambodian Diaspora tackles the contemporary relationship with memories and the recollection of small narratives beyond mainstream histories. At the same time, stemming from the artists’ local awareness and global perspectives, the exhibition looks at universal concerns that are able to invest a broader audience with a participatory role in experiencing and responding to the works by ultimately dwelling on their own migratory experience.
For more information please contact: info [at] incube-arts.org
inCube Arts SPACE programme is made possible with the generous support by Mr. Jeremy HU.
