Palimpsest for Generation 1.5: A performance by Anida Yoeu Ali

Anida Yoeu Ali is a first-generation Muslim Khmer multi-disciplinary artist born in Cambodia and raised in Chicago, IL. Her installation and performance works investigate the artistic, spiritual, and political collisions of her hybrid transnational identity.

With Palimpest for Generation 1.5, Ali transforms her body into a palimpsest—a reused writing material that contains traces of the original text. In this performance, histories from her family’s memories connected to Cambodia are inscribed in ink on her back, washed with water, and repeated, leaving stains on her garments. When the gestures end and the body leaves, detached roots, a disembodied dress, and faint traces of a performed history remain. Palimpsest for Generation 1.5 examines the cultural and emotional resonance of place and memory in relationship to personal histories of violence and diaspora.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Anida Yoeu Ali (b.1974, Battambang, Cambodia) is an artist whose work spans performance, installation, video, images, public encounters, and political agitation. She 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 work has 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 the 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 U.S.