Key Terms: Exile, Expression, Femininity, Agency, Curation, Expansion, Media control, Power dynamics, Wellness, Technology

 Past: July 16, 2020, 5 pm

FIELD SESSION 7.16.20

In conversation with Arahmaiani, Alison Nguyen, Mehregan Pezeshki, Ashley Yang-Thompson, and Yang Yeung

Works Discussed
White Wednesdays / Drowned Dream
A Walk With A3 / Sound Pocket
Demented Dedication (Lunch Poems) - produced at Flux Factory
Dessert-Disaster / you can’t plan a perfect day sometimes it just happens / Andra8
I Don’t Want To Be Part of Your Legend

Geopolitical + Socio-historical Contexts: Women’s rights in Iran; 2016 Election of Donald Trump; Hegemony in Hollywood; Role of women in Indonesia

Discussion Questions
How do we work to preserve the victories in social justice which have been won through historical battles when new regimes emerge to usurp control?
Are there senses we haven’t fully explored?
What makes an event, work, or interaction become a prompt to action?
Is there an intrinsic hierarchy between process and outcome, or do artists determine this?

MEETING MINUTES

The first Working Group conversation revolved around the subjects of personal agency in the face of confounding systems. Women took center stage in the endeavor of identifying sources of hope; hope for freedom, identity, and change from unanticipated sources.

Mehregan Pezeshki’s presentation kicked off the group meeting by putting the spotlight the autonomy of Iranian women. Though they have often played integral roles in Iranian history through the arts and sciences, as well as revolutions past, they continue to be relegated within modern Iranian society to a lower social status. Mehregan’s works “White Wednesdays” and “Drowned Dream” explored the (figuratively and literally) arrested futures of women in Iranian society, challenging the country’s compulsory hijab dress code and frequent arrests on the basis of moral crimes.

The next presenter was Yang Yeung, who discussed themes of exile and superposition – being here and there. In her curatorial role for the Hong Kong auditory facilitator “Sound Pocket,” she often reckons with the relationship between the senses and discovery. Tackling the inherent limitations of expressing truth through art, she stressed that working “in exile mode” can present a unique opportunity to produce new discoveries from unanticipated sources. “A Walk with A3” is one such work: an art space which was rented in an attempt to bring artists together without explicit direction or cause; simply to explore how these various intersections may produce new and unexpected realities in their incessant artistic questioning – all visible through the windows of its namesake shopfront A3 on Sharp Street West in Hong Kong.

Ashley Yang-Thompson (formally known as Miss Expanding Universe) went on to take the group through her residency at Flux Factory in New York, describing a lifelong process which combines the therapeutic with the expressive. During her monthlong stay, she made daily trips about the city as video artist J Triangular recorded the experiences directly to VHS. Ashley then used nights to digest the footage both physically and mentally, as the sporadic source material while allowing all “insanity [and] distractions show up in the art.” Her work transmutes self-affirmation, poetry, and political uncertainty into unyielding artifacts of self-narration.

Alison Nguyen was also an artist-in-residency at Flux, and discussed some of her video work as it pertains to subversive media techniques and the emotional power of filmmaking which is often manipulated to ideological ends. In “Dessert-Disaster,” she juxtaposed the clichéd “seduction” of food advertisement with the cinematography of disasters both natural and man-made. Her more recent work further critiques the many repetitive tropes of modern filmmaking (“you can’t plan a perfect day…” with it’s sampling of lens flares galore) and the relationship between technology and health as the hypermodern world grows more obsessed with self-optimization, via the multimedia avatar “Andra8.”

Arahmaiani Feisal pulled focus back to the conversation’s start with her work depicting womanhood in Indonesian society, “I Don’t Want to Be Your Legend.” She used the opportunity to discuss the particulars of being female in her home country while looking to the mixing, collision, and layering of different cultures as a source of imaginative inspiration. Arahmaiani’s lifetime of work in performance art encapsulates the subversive power of media which the day’s other presenters also aspired to, as an emotional and political weapon to reject realistic portrayals of the world as it is now in favor of how it ought to be.

Notes taken by Manmit Singh Chahal and Monica Lim
Revised by Moises De La Cruz 

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