Samuels Center for Community Partnerships and Civic Transformation (COMPACT)

Global Community Engagement presents Anida Yoeu Ali in "Palimpsest for Generation 1.5"

Tuesday, April 2
7:00 pm, Senior Studios, Epstein Building

In this piece, Anida Ali’s body is transformed into a palimpsest where histories are inscribed, layering one moment over another. Text pulled from her family’s memories and histories related to Cambodia are inscribed in ink onto her back. As a result of the act, ink and water drip onto her back and stain the dress. When the gestures end and the body leaves the installation, detached roots, a disembodied dress, and faint traces of a performed history remain. The work examines the cultural and emotional resonance of place and memory in relationship to personal histories of violence and diaspora.

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Artist bio

Anida Yoeu Ali (b.1974, Battambang, Cambodia) is an artist whose works span performance, installation, video, images, public encounters, and political agitation. She is a first-generation Muslim Khmer woman born in Cambodia and raised in Chicago. After residing for over three decades outside of Cambodia, Ali returned to work in Phnom Penh, Cambodia’s capital, as part of her 2011 U.S. Fulbright Fellowship. 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 been the recipient of grants from the Rockefeller Foundation, Ford Foundation, the National Endowment of the Arts and the Illinois Arts Council. Ali earned her B.F.A. from University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign) and an M.F.A. from School of the Art Institute Chicago. She is a founding collaborative partner of Studio Revolt, an independent artist run media lab in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. Studio Revolt’s public performances and resulting images of Gallery X and Public Square were part of Our City Festival 2011 and 2012 (Phnom Penh). Ali’s The Buddhist Bug, a multidisciplinary work that investigates displacement and identity through humor, absurdity and performance, has been exhibited in Phnom Penh galleries, Singapore International Photography Festival, Malaysia Heritage Centre Singapore, and Southeast Asia ArtsFest London, as well as in the Open Sea exhibition at the Musée d’art Contemporain (Lyon, France), at the Asia Pacific Triennial 8 at the Queensland Art Gallery (Brisbane, Australia) where a newly commissioned video of the series premiered, and at the 5th Fukuoka Asian Art Triennale where Ali participated as an artist in residence, and at the Seattle Asian Art Museum.

Ali’s artworks are included in several private collections and the public collection of the Mainland Art Fund, Australia.

Co-sponsored by the Rose Art Museum, and the Creativity, the Arts, and Social Transformation (CAST) minor.