‘The Space Between Inside/Outside’
Performance + installation by Anida Yoeu Ali
Opening: 6-9pm Monday July 2, 2012
Artist talk in conversation with curator Natalie Pace: 10am Saturday, July 7, 2012
Java Cafe & Gallery 56 Sihanouk Blvd. Phnom Penh, Cambodia
Exhibition: July 2 – August 5, 2012; 7am-10pm daily

This exhibition by Anida Yoeu Ali is the culmination of three months as Java Arts’ inaugural artist-in-residence. Spanning photography, video, sculpture, and installation, “The Space Between Inside/Outside” examines the areas between the playful and the reflective, performance and the real, proximity and distance.

In uniting these layers of her work, the artist ties these different elements together with aesthetic and conceptual threads of the ‘white cube’ and a red stool.  As a counterpoint to the Western concept of the White Cube, the repeated use of the red stool, not only locates the artist within the individual works, but localizes the works themselves to their Cambodian context.

Through her participatory approach and performances in public space, Anida seeks to circumvent what she perceives to be the limitations imposed by the confines of the traditional ‘white cube’ gallery space. Taking this as a visual motif, she references the formal art institution across this body of work.

For ‘Enter the Studio, Enter the Frame’, Anida demarcated an interactive studio with thick, black lines in her JavaArts residency space. In front of a camera, the artist invited people to interact by creating compositions with their bodies and a series of short red stools.  The responses were varied, fluctuating from the intimate, serious, to the jovial. These images have been reconfigured in parallel to those of the ’white cube’ in the interactive installation ‘View from Here’ which poses the provocation to come view and to be viewed. ‘View From Here’ is part of this upcoming exhibition at Java Café.

Anida narrates and gives life to urban and rural locations, which previously evoked solitude. Playing with scale for dramatic effect, the exaggerated stool elevates the artist above the organic environments she inhabits. The masses of red textiles flowing from her body, interweaves between the foreground and background, connecting the panorama of people, spaces and moments. Through bodily movement and material, explosions of intense beauty arise amidst the contrasting backdrops of urban decay and dilapidation. The sculptural moment is enacted and captured as wind picks up the fabric, creating a billowing, graceful wave, injecting a temporary burst of red color into these spaces.

Situated somewhere between performance, event, and object, Anida’s practice explores personal and poetic ruminations on loss and life. These works merge and linger as measures of time and space; between here and there, inside and outside, between the past and what will pass.

The opening event will itself be an extension of these works, with performance increasingly becoming life and life becoming art.

This exhibition is presented with the Free Your Minds Festival 2012, a Meta House program.

The exhibition and residency is produced by JavaArts and Studio Revolt with additional support from Van Cleve Fine Arts.

Artist Biography
Performance artist, writer and global agitator, Anida Yoeu Ali is a first generation Muslim Khmer woman born in Cambodia and raised in Chicago. Utilizing an interdisciplinary approach to artmaking, her installation and performance works investigate the artistic, spiritual and political collisions of a hybrid transnational identity. She earned her B.F.A. in Graphic Design from University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign) and an M.F.A. in Studio Arts/Performance from School of the Art Institute Chicago. She is a collaborative partner with Studio Revolt, an independent artist run collaborative media lab in Phnom Penh, Cambodia where she currently resides. Anida is a recipient of the 2011 U.S. Fulbright Fellowship to Cambodia where her art and research focused on creation mythologies and birthing stories of Khmer women. Her short film about exiled Cambodian Americans, “My Asian Americana (2011),” won the public vote for the White House “What’s Your Story” Video Challenge. Anida’s artistic work has been the recipient of grants from the Rockefeller Foundation, Ford Foundation, the National Endowment of the Arts and the Illinois Arts Council. (www.studio-revolt.com)