Tacoma-based international artist Anida Yoeu Ali makes her SAM debut with “Hybrid Skin, Mythical Presence,” a solo exhibition that celebrates performance, public encounters, and political agitation as powerful art forms. In her work, Ali enacts fantastic mythical heroines as assertions of feminist, queer, and alternative visibilities. These personas are hybrids of different religious aesthetics to disrupt ideas around otherness. Her performances are invitations for viewers to wander, witness, and joyfully experience moments that transcend the ordinary. Central to many of her performances is her use of textiles, a practice rooted in her Cham-Muslim refugee migration experience-her family fled Cambodia with only the clothes on their backs.
This exhibition explores two of Ali’s iconic performance-based artworks: “The Buddhist Bug” and “The Red Chador.” A creation myth sprung from her interest in transcendence, humor, and spiritual turmoil, “The Buddhist Bug” features a huge saffron-colored creature that Ali enacts in performance. Responding to a global rise of Islamophobia, misogyny, and racism, “The Red Chador” is an ongoing series of silent public interventions and documented performances that challenge perceptions and fears of the ‘other.’ The colorful, transformative garments worn by the artist and others during the performances are on view, along with video, photography, and other installation art that brings you into previous performances of the works from site-specific locations around the world.
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ANIDA YOEU ALI: HYBRID SKIN, MYTHICAL PRESENCE
Jan 18 - Jul 7 2024
Seattle Art Museum
visitsam.org/ali
28 авг 2024
