
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)