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Unchartered Distance:Performing in between Here and There
The text that follows is an edited excerpt from a panel presentation held on 27 June 2019 as part of the "Pathways of Performativity in Contemporary Southeast Asian Art" Symposium. The original presentation was accompanied by slides of images and texts that represented main themes running across my works. In this text, I have edited it down to focus on The Buddhist Bug series as this work was exhibited and performed at the Haus Der Kunst.
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1979
This is where we begin. A refugee camp between the border of Thailand and Cambodia, a camp whose name I do not know. We begin here in the inbetween. We begin with these four photographs. These are the only images that I have of myself, artifacts from a traumatic period in my family's history. These images are the closest things to owning my "baby" photos. Except here I am not a baby. I am five years old. A red head, scorched from the '79 sun. I am pictured to the right of a box—a care package from our Thai family, who found us after they received word that some of us may have survived the Khmer Rouge brutality. [End Page 282]
I place these "family" photos at the beginning of my talk to remind myself of not only where I come from, but also the ways in which photography continues to serve as a critical extension of self. And the ways in which photos can fill in lapses of memories—the gaps of absence for which there is no recovery.
A photo can extend a moment and that is an essential part of my practice.
1975
This was the name of the 2013 exhibition in New York City that featured my Camp series of images mentioned earlier. In the series, I silkscreened the photos onto fabric and proceeded to stitch and embroider barbed wire patterns onto the surface of the images. For me, this work failed because I was trying to be a visual artist, and I'm not. I'm a performance artist, and this is where visual works fail for me. This work I was trying to make as a visual piece lacked liveness or aliveness—and ultimately it's that exchange of energy that I desperately seek.
Although I rely on a photo to extend a moment, it's the series of actions before and after the captured moment which is my art. My medium is performance.
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2009
I began conceiving The Buddhist Bug the year after giving birth to my first child and was directly influenced by a collapsible play tunnel gifted to us. This child's toy gave me the form I sought for my diasporic creature. The Buddhist Bug series is about coming to terms with creating from a place of turmoil and empowerment, and using that "in-betweenness" as a place for creation and wonder as much as wander. The work began in Chicago but would not take root until I landed in Cambodia. The Buddhist Bug is my most ambitious body of work, a creation myth sprung from my interest in hybridity, transcendence and otherness.
Identities are in flux, they fluctuate. There are unsettling shifts. This is part of my diasporic dilemma. We are constantly fluctuating, between insider/outsider, local/foreigner, presence/absence, and we don't always have a choice about that. It kicks in at different moments. Like when the diasporic body returns.
2004
This is the first time I visited Cambodia after decades of absence. I become both numb and overwhelmed on arrival. It's a simultaneous feeling of [End Page 284]
abundance/loss. It was during this first trip that I fell in love with the land-scape of orange. Monks in saffron robes were everywhere. The inescapable orange colour would later resurface.
2011
I have been fortunate enough to return to Cambodia after 30 years of absence to realize The Buddhist Bug series and other artistic projects. It's poetic to return as an adult, to live and work in Cambodia for exactly five years, the same amount of time I had spent as a small child before my family fled as refugees from the Khmer Rouge. I have been chasing those five years of my childhood, haunted by fractured memories and wondering who I would have been had we not been forced to leave. I have come to realize: We didn't choose to leave. The leaving chose us.
This shift in thinking about our exodus has empowered me to heal and make meaningful art. As a diasporic artist, I can't help but excavate themes related to body memories, belonging and fractured identities. I believe performing narratives is an act of social engagement that contributes to collective healing. For me, performance and storytelling become ways of bridging [End Page 285] the interior and exterior space of self, as well as initiate critical dialogues between communities and institutions.
2012
From daylight to nightfall. Inside classrooms and outside amusement parks, along stairwells and street corners, The Buddhist Bug appears. Present, visible and ever curious.
For me, The Buddhist Bug as a displaced creature is destined to travel and wander amidst the "in-between". This space, which exists between who and where The Bug is, can be a powerful place for encounter, habitation and reinvention. The Bug longs for stillness while on a constant journey. The Bug is a source of refuge while on a perpetual search for home. The Bug is both a bridge and obstacle. The Bug is a creature belonging in this world yet appearing to be from another universe. Set intentionally amongst school children, an oxcart driver, a Muslim fishing village and random people in a busy alleyway, my works engage everyday people in an effort to include them in conversations rarely afforded them, in the context of contemporary art. As an artist, I have never been able to quietly create works inside a studio space. That is a luxury I have never had. Instead, my works are performances taken into the streets and rice fields, classrooms and hawker stands—energetic sites where everyday people and daily life occur. Only after the site-specific performances does the work return as photographic or cinematic artifacts, works of art that are then shared inside and outside of Cambodia.
2019
Part of the poetry of this moment is that The Buddhist Bug as an original garment installation exists currently in segments in two different countries, here in Munich and on view in Kuala Lumpur. The segments come together to form a fantastic saffron-coloured creature in varying lengths. One intentionally created to span the length of a 100-metre bridge or coil into a small orange ball. The Bug concurrently exists in two different and distant cities at the same time. It's the hybrid transnational existence I often allude to in my works. It's also what art historian Dr Nora Taylor referenced earlier at this conference as a kind of deliberate fragmentation.
I am thrilled to have returned as an artist creating not only new memories but new art and contributing in significant ways to a a re-emerging Khmer society, one that includes narratives inside and outside of the country, ulti-mately remapping the distance I've been chasing between here and there. [End Page 286]
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Anida Yoeu Ali is an artist, educator and global agitator born in Cambodia and raised in Chicago. Ali's artistic practice spans performance, installation, videos, images, public encounters and political agitation. Utilizing an interdisciplinary approach to artmaking, her installation and performance works investigate the artistic, spiritual and political collisions of a hybrid transnational identity. Ali has performed and exhibited internationally from the Palais de Tokyo to the Shangri-La Museum of Islamic Art, Culture and Design. Ali currently serves as a Senior Artist-in-Residence at the University of Washington, Bothell where she teaches art, performance and global studies courses. She spends much of her time travelling and working between the Asia-Pacific region and the US.