Sheida Soleimani, Maryam, 2017, archival pigment print on cotton, polyester filling, dimensions variable, image in courtesy of the artist
Thursday, February 1 6:30-8:30
NARS Foundation Gallery
Tiffany Jaeyeon Shin, curator of Myth, Memory, Migration: Stories from the Asian Diaspora, hosts a conversation between exhibiting artists: Amna Asghar, Dana Davenport, Umber Majeed, Tammy Nguyen, Sahana Ramakrishnan, and Sheida Soleimani
How does archiving/ storytelling resist dominant history and produce a collective archive that accounts for counterfactual worlds/ memories/ mythology/ futurity/ narratives?
What boundaries and erasures exist within the Asian diaspora? Who gets to be included/ excluded from the discussion?
How do the works speak about intergenerational trauma and if so, how does the process of archiving family lineages, reconnecting with oral histories, and working with found materials change our positionality and connection to family, migration, and memory?
As artists, how do we remain integral to the stories of our works without our bodies becoming instrumentalized and weaponized against us in white institutions? What are the dangers of representing Asian identity in simple regional representation or with the dominant focus on representational politics, adhering to the neoliberal standards of multiculturalism and the white agenda?