statement

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.

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.

Text by Natalie Pace, for full text, please click here. 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 Art.

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. (http://www.studio-revolt.com)

about the artist

Anida Yoeu Ali

Anida Yoeu Ali (b.1974, Battambang) is an artist whose works span performance, installation, video, poetry, public encounters, and political agitation. She is a first generation Muslim Khmer woman born in Cambodia and raised in Chicago. After residing for over three decades outside of Cambodia, Ali returned to work in Phnom Penh as part of her 2011 U.S. Fulbright Fellowship. Utilizing an interdisciplinary approach to artmaking, her installation and performance works investigate the artistic, spiritual and political collisions of a hybrid transnational identity. From the Faroe Islands to the Bronx, Copenhagen to Ho Chi Minh City, she lectures, exhibits and performs internationally. Her pioneering work with the critically acclaimed group I Was Born With Two Tongues (1998-2003) is archived with the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Program and the Hemispheric Institute Digital Video Library . Her 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. Anida earned her B.F.A. from University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign) and an M.F.A. in from School of the Art Institute Chicago. She is a collaborative partner with Studio Revolt, an independent artist run media lab in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. Studio Revolt’s short film about Cambodian American deportations, "My Asian Americana" (2011), won the public vote for the White House "What’s Your Story Video Challenge" but was controversially dismissed by contest organizers. In 2013, she will embark on the "Generation Return: Art and Justice Tour" presenting and discussing her works about contemporary justice and its residual effects on the Cambodian American experience. Anida continues to make art and raise her family in Phnom Penh, a city once home to her father.