Anida-Yoeu-Ali-LP

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A person wearing a red chador, standing in the water, with a light blue sky — *Water Birth, The Red Chador: Genesis I*, Kaiona Beach, Oahu, USA, 2019, Anida Yoeu Ali.

Campus Dining, The Buddhist Bug Series, 2012, Anida Yoeu Ali. — *Campus Dining, The Buddhist Bug Series*, 2012, Anida Yoeu Ali.

Anida Yoeu Ali: Hybrid Skin, Mythical Presence

Jan 18 – Jul 7 2024
SEATTLE ASIAN ART MUSEUM
South Gallery

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Tacoma-based international artist Anida Yoeu Ali makes her SAM debut with this 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.

Hybrid Skin, Mythical Presence explores two of Ali’s iconic performances: The Buddhist Bug and The Red Chador. The colorful, transformative garments worn by the artist and others during the performances—which the artist considers “artifacts” rather than artworks when not enacted by her—are on view. Video, photography, and other installation art bring viewers into previous performances of the works from site-specific locations around the world. During the run of the exhibition, Ali will enact the works in two separate performances: The Buddhist Bug will be performed on March 23, 2024 and The Red Chador will be performed on June 1, 2024.

Lead Sponsor

Generous Support
City of Seattle Office of Arts & Culture

Live Performances

Anida Yoeu Ali: The Buddhist Bug

Mar 23 2024

Seattle Asian Art Museum

Anida Yoeu Ali: The Red Chador (Afterlife)

Jun 1 2024

Seattle Art Museum

THE BUDDHIST BUG

Anida in the orange buddah bug costume — *Around Town #1, The Buddhist Bug Series*, 2012, Anida Yoeu Ali.

Anida in the orang buddah bug costume — Live Performance of *The Buddhist Bug* At Open SEA exhibition, Musée d'art contemporain de Lyon, France, 2015, Anida Yoeu Ali.

A creation myth springing from her interest in transcendence, humor, and spiritual turmoil, The Buddhist Bug comprises a huge saffron-colored creature that Ali enacts in performance. Extending nearly 328 feet in length, at one end is a human face tightly encircled in cloth, and at the other a pair of feet. This transportable construction reflects the contradictory experiences of displacement and belonging, exploring Ali’s complex relationship between Cambodia and her own transnational identity. Its bright orange color is the same one worn by Buddhist monks and represents Cambodia’s dominant Buddhist culture, while the cloth that tightly encircles the Bug’s female face represents both the hijab worn by some Muslim women and the ethnic minority of Cambodian Muslims to which Ali and her family belong.

Ali’s expansive performance project takes shape through live engagement, photography, and video set amongst everyday Cambodian people in ordinary moments, in which the presence of The Buddhist Bug provokes questions of belonging and displacement. Each vignette presents a moment of real life with the element of The Bug making each frame more surreal and provocative. When brought to life by human performance, The Buddhist Bug becomes a site of play and discovery, inhabiting the diasporic dilemma of memory and reinvention.

THE RED CHADOR

person in a red sequence chador holding a sign that says Ban Me — *The Red Chador: The Day After* (performance still), Seattle, Washington, USA, November 9, 2016, Anida Yoeu Ali.

seven people walking across a street in rainbow chadors — *Abbey Road, The Red Chador: Genesis I*, Main St. & 102nd Ave, Bellevue, Washington, USA, 2021, Anida Yoeu Ali.

Responding to a global rise of Islamophobia, misogyny, and racism, The Red Chador is an ongoing series of silent public performances that challenge perceptions and fears of the “other.” Ali challenges fearful responses to a figure in a chador, a large cloth worn as a head covering, veil, and shawl worn by some Muslim women. More than simply an item of clothing, this work is an allegory for the hypervisibility of Muslim women and a means to activate critical conversations on identity. While wearing the sparkling red chador, Ali transforms into her alter ego, engaging an unsuspecting public through small interactions that evolve alongside society’s changing political and cultural landscapes. Following performances in France, Hong Kong, Cambodia, Australia, and several US cities, the original performance garment mysteriously disappeared in 2017 while the artist was in transit from Tel Aviv. Two years later, the work was rebirthed alongside six additional sequined chadors in various colors of the rainbow. In presenting all seven chadors at the same time, Ali creates a space for proud Muslim women to collectively gather and exist for all to see.

About The Artist

Anida Yoeu Ali (b. 1974, Battambang, Cambodia) is an interdisciplinary artist whose works span performance, installation, new media, public encounters, and political agitation. Born in Cambodia and raised in Chicago, she is a first-generation American of mixed Malay, Cham, Khmer, and Thai ancestries. Working transnationally, Ali investigates the artistic, spiritual, and political collisions of her diasporic, hybrid identity with the resolve that in-betweenness is a powerful space for creation and provocation. Ali believes performance allows for a magic of reinventing the self and projecting “larger-than-life” personas liberated from oppressive representations. Currently based in Tacoma, Ali is also the co-founder of Studio Revolt, an independent artist-run media lab whose works have agitated the White House, won awards at film festivals, and redefined what it means to create sans studio and trans-nomadically. Ali’s works have been acquired by public and private collections and globally exhibited, including at Haus der Kunst, Palais de Tokyo, the Smithsonian, Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, and Shangri La Museum of Islamic Art, Culture & Design. A recipient of the 2020 Art Matters Fellowship and the 2015 Sovereign Asian Art Prize from Hong Kong, she received her MFA from School of the Art Institute Chicago. Ali serves as a Senior Artist-in-Residence at the University of Washington Bothell, with an artistic practice between the Asia-Pacific region and the US.

Portrait of Anida Ali, cropped upper body shot — Artist bio picture, Image courtesy of Studio Revolt, photo: Masahiro Sugano.

All Images Courtesy of the Artist ©️ Studio Revolt.

Water Birth, The Red Chador: Genesis I, Kaiona Beach, Oahu, USA, 2019, Anida Yoeu Ali, Cambodian American, archival inkjet print, photo: Masahiro Sugano. Campus Dining, The Buddhist Bug Series, 2012, Anida Yoeu Ali, Cambodian American, archival inkjet print, photo: Masahiro Sugano. Around Town #1, The Buddhist Bug Series, 2012, Anida Yoeu Ali, Cambodian American, photo: Masahiro Sugano. Live Performance of The Buddhist Bug At Open SEA exhibition, Musée d'art contemporain de Lyon, France, 2015, Anida Yoeu Ali, Cambodian American, photo: Blaise Adilon. The Red Chador: The Day After (performance still), Seattle, Washington, USA, November 9, 2016, Anida Yoeu Ali, Cambodian American, archival inkjet print, photo: Masahiro Sugano. Abbey Road, The Red Chador: Genesis I, Main St. & 102nd Ave, Bellevue, Washington, USA, 2021, Anida Yoeu Ali, Cambodian American, archival inkjet print, photo: Dylan Maddux. Artist bio picture, photo: Masahiro Sugano.

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