Artist Talk & Keynote Address with Anida Yoeu Ali

*Location: Ursa Major at the Bronco Student Center (BSC)

About the Artist: Anida Yoeu Ali 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.

About the Exhibit: Responding to a global rise of Islamophobia, misogyny, and racism, The Red Chador continues Ali’s thematic interest in using religious aesthetics and public encounters to challenge perceptions and fears of otherness. While wearing her signature sparkling red chador, a large cloth worn as a head covering, veil, and shawl worn by some Muslim women, Ali transforms into her alter ego, engaging an unsuspecting public through small interactions that evolve alongside society’s changing political and cultural landscapes. More than simply an item of clothing, the work is an allegory for the hypervisibility of Muslim women and a means to activate critical conversations on identity. 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 Muslim women to collectively gather and exist for all to see. The Red Chador has been performed in 16 cities across seven countries since 2015, notably Palais de Tokyo (2015), the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center (2016), and Shangri La Museum of Islamic Art, Culture and Design (2019), with this exhibit being her Southern California debut.

The exhibition and public programs are co-sponsored by CSU ASAP (CSU Asian American, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander Student Achievement Program), Ethnic & Women's Studies Department, Asian and Pacific Islander Student Center (APISC), Social Justice Action Committee (SJAC), Kellogg Honors College (KHC), College of Letters, Arts, and Social Sciences (CLASS), College of Education and Integrative Studies (CEIS).

Host or Publisher Dr. Marimas Hosan Mostiller