Category: art

alserkal avenue in dubai

i found my groove in dubai today. it’s called alserkal avenue. located in al quoz, halfway between old and new dubai, this contemporary art hub was created in 2008 by housing art spaces, galleries, internet cafes, and artist studios in existing warehouses and factory buildings. incidentally, i started with an exhibition that purports to lift the voices of kashmiri women thru photography and testimonies. it was awful. from the get-go. more about that later.

i want to share what i loved first: ‘for you mother’ by palestinian artist rula halawani. based on conversations with her mother about palestine and her words, “even when we die and leave this world, our spirits remain, floating in the skies of our country,” halawani has produced these beautifully haunted and haunting, large-scale photomontages, a “marriage between archival images of palestinian families before the 1948 mass diaspora and palestinian landscapes captured thru her lens.”
halawani is also interested in examining how palestinian landscapes have changed — the people and natural environment that disappeared and are still disappearing.

decision to leave

on the flight from JFK to dubai, i saw ‘decision to leave.’ beautifully crafted by park chan-wook, it’s a slippery film, hard to pin down or categorize. it’s romance, mystery, crime, and detective story. it’s about obsessions, repetitions, imaginings, watching and being watched, recordings, replays, metaphors, poetry, death, murder, desire, and fantasy. it slides back and forth in time and space, even in language and translation (chinese and korean). an evasive, fatalistic, seductive film that takes its time (2 hours 18 min). makes me long for richer, more challenging and inventive filmmaking and storytelling than what we see celebrated in the US.

A grant for my project

I am beyond thrilled to share that I have been awarded a NYSCA (New York State Council on the Arts) grant for my project “Return to Sender: Women of Color in Colonial Postcards and the Politics of Representation.” This project will involve a short film, an art exhibition, artist talks, and a community discussion led by three women of color. The film premiere will be at Cinema Arts Centre in Huntington, NY, on Oct 1st this year.

There are so many amazing people to thank: first of all, Patty Eljaiek at Huntington Arts Council, Inc. without whose encouragement I wouldn’t have applied for this grant and whose consistent support was invaluable; Emily Dowd, Kieran Johnson and everyone at @huntingtonarts; Stephanie Gotard at @huntingtonhistoricalsociety who is my community partner (and my biggest cheerleader); Dylan Toombs who shot the footage for the film with dazzling artistry; Boris Sapozhnikov for additional cinematography; the beautiful and talented Fatimah Arshad, Urvashi Bhattacharya, and Sumayia Islam who are the stars of the film; Rajesh Barnabas and Darien Lamen who will be helping with postproduction; Nia Adams, Madeline Churney, and Farhana Islam for agreeing to lead a post-screening discussion; Jeremy Dennis for being open to a screening at Ma’s House & BIPOC Art Studio; and finally, Dylan Skolnik and René Bouchard for a film premiere and discussion at Cinema Arts Centre in spite of many complications.

Also trying to get a student intern from Stony Brook’s Women’s and Gender Studies dept to curate the art exhibition — thank you to the faculty there.

I will write more about the film, but for now I want to thank all my people — everyone who has worked with me, believed in me, and inspired me. Love you all!

This project is made possible with funds from the Statewide Community Regrant Program, a regrant program of the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature and administered by The Huntington Arts Council, Inc.

Editing The Injured Body: Greta Niu

Greta Niu: I just don’t want to lose sight of what makes up the microaggressions. It is implicit biases around race or ethnicity or gender or gender expression or class or size or disability. Those are the pieces that we’ve been fighting and we have always been fighting against. I don’t want people to think we are done with that. Now all we have to deal with are these microaggressions. The fact is, it’s a whole continuum of behaviors that are harmful, from a little poke to physical violence.

Photograph by Rajesh Barnabas

Editing The Injured Body: Lauren Jimerson

Lauren Jimerson: On the reservation, I didn’t think about my life past 18 or 20. It was hard to imagine being an adult. When I was 12, I saw the first young person pass away. Someone I grew up with, my cousin and neighbor. He was 19 or 20 and died in a car accident. I saw all these young people passing away. I didn’t know what the future looked like. Then I had Angel and it changed the course of my life.

Photograph by Erica Jae

Sunsets…

Etel Adnan: You know, sunsets are violently beautiful, I would say that they are so by definition, but there are lights, not even colorful in the habitual sense, lights elemental, mercurial, silvery, sulfurous, copper-made, that make us stop, then lose balance, make us open our arms not knowing what else to do, arrest us as if struck by lightning, a soft lightning, a welcome one. I wait for those lights, I know some of you do too, wherever you are, I mean when you are standing by an ocean, alone, within the calmness of your spirit. Be planetary.

[West Meadow Beach today]

some good news

this makes me sooooo happy. as i’ve said before, give me michelle yeoh all day and every day. to more films that center the stories of and performances by people of color, immigrants, refugees, minorities, marginalized communities, and women, especially older women. it will make for much better art, as is proven over and over again. we want our culture to reflect our realities. the days of the ubiquitous straight white dude are over.

my review: triangle of sadness

saw ‘triangle of sadness’ by ruben ostlund, then went back and watched ‘the square’ again. will rewatch ‘force majeure’ as well. what a brilliant, hilarious, provocative filmmaker. have been thinking about his work and how to encapsulate it. he likes to invert or complicate what is ‘normal.’ he strips away western society’s veneer of civilization, exposes its violent vulgar core, and pokes holes in what is considered the social contract.

he does this stylistically as well, by inserting sounds and visual disturbances in his scenes (an elevator door that keeps closing in the middle of an intense convo, baby cries during a marketing pitch, chairs crashing to the ground while a couple confront each other after an awkward one-night stand, etc).

he reaches for some of the mightiest, most glittery symbols of high culture (modern art, fashion, even winter sports), roots them out from their aesthetic safe place, and reveals the social rot, money, privilege, and absurdity they engender.

his films are always set in exclusive, elitist contexts – a bougie ski resort, a contemporary art museum, a luxury yacht – where the rich and beautiful prance and prevaricate about their wealth. a russian capitalist who quotes ronald reagan, a cute old couple who’ve made their fortune as arms dealers, a museum curator who is proudly liberal but couldn’t cut it without the privileges he wields, art collectors and aristos who remain paralyzed in the face of an assault on one of their own, how power hierarchies can be flipped like a switch, how the elite are completely bereft of survival skills, ideas of masculinity, the marginalization of people of color, horrors of the service industry, capitalism and homelessness, capitalism and art, beauty as trade and industry, the list goes on.

there’s always so much to unpack.

Scene from Triangle of Sadness

Polychromy

Saw ‘Polychromy’ at the Met. So interesting how color has been erased from “Western” history.

Carl Jennings: Color is a code, a sign, a message – we use it to communicate and in turn, it has the power to shape how we think and feel. For the last 500 years or so… to be civilized is to eschew color, to resist its temptations and its charms. As Goethe observed of his times, nearly 200 years ago, “… savage nations, uneducated people, and children have a great predilection for vivid colors… people of refinement avoid vivid colours in their dress”. And Charles Blanc, the French Minister of Culture, expressing a sentiment shared by many scholars and art historians, over the perceived opposition between line and color in art, stated in 1848 that, “…colour is the peculiar characteristic of the lower forms of nature, while drawing becomes the medium of expression, more and more dominant, the higher we rise in the scale of being”.

These quotes belie a sentiment common in Western culture and eloquently documented in David Batchelor’s fascinating book on the topic, a sentiment that sees color as “something for children, savages, minorities, and women”: a loathing and a fear of color that he calls — chromophobia.

But it wasn’t always this way. The history of the west is nothing if not colorful — but very little of that evidence exists nowadays. Color has either faded with time and the elements, or it has been purposefully removed and whitewashed. The Greek and Roman statues of antiquity, pure and ethereal in their whiteness, are an illusion. They were never white. Instead, they were painted, in great and often garish detail.