The Buddhist Bug Project

source: highlike

THE BUDDHIST BUG

The Buddhist Bug seeks to map a new spiritual and social landscape through its surreal existence amongst ordinary people and everyday environments. Captured and exhibited primarily as photography, video, and performance-installations, the Bug is an interdisciplinary ongoing series of performances that explore issues of displacement and belonging. Anida Yoeu Ali’s works attempt to find crucial intersections between performing narratives and audience engagement. The Bug is a fantastic saffron-colored creature that can span the length of a 40-metre bridge or coil into a small orange ball. Rooted in an autobiographical exploration of identity, the Bug comes from the artist’s own spiritual turmoil between Islam and Buddhism. Set amongst everyday people in ordinary moments, the Bug provokes obvious 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. Consistent throughout this series is the unique combination of humor and otherness. The project reflects the artist’s personality, one that combines humor, performance, science fiction and Ali’s love of everyday culture into moments that transcend the ordinary.

ARTIST BIO

Anida Yoeu Ali (b.1974, Battambang) 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 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. Her artistic work 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. in 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, Southeast Asia ArtsFest London, and featured at the 5th Fukuoka Asian Art Triennale where Ali participated as an artist in residence. Ali’s work will be included in group exhibitions at the Palais de Tokyo (Paris, France) and Musée d’art Contemporain (Lyon, France) in 2015. Ali’s artworks are included in private collections and the public collection of the Mainland Art Fund, Australia.
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source: javaartsorg

The Buddhist Bug is the concept of artist Anida Yoeu Ali, and a project of Studio Revolt. In the artist statement she explains: “The Buddhist Bug Project seeks to map a new spiritual and social landscape through its surreal existence amongst ordinary people and everyday environments. The Buddhist Bug is a fantastic saffron-colored creature that can span the length of a 30-metre bridge or coil into a small orange ball. Rooted in an autobiographical exploration of identity, the Bug comes from the artist’s own spiritual turmoil between Islam and Buddhism. Set amongst everyday people in ordinary moments, the Bug provokes obvious questions of belonging and displacement.”

The Bug is an other-worldly creature with bright orange “skin” the color of Buddhist monk robes with a head piece based on the Islamic hijab. Together with photographer Masahiro Sugano (her creative partner from Studio Revolt), Anida brought the Bug to Cambodia, the country of her birth and of the Bug. She created a series of site-specific performances, inserting the Bug into urban and rural landscapes, resulting in humorous and surreal scenarios.

The Buddhist Bug will also be exhibited online at the Philanthropic Museum, in collaboration with its founder and curator Patricia Levasseur de la Motte. For additional details, Patricia can be contacted at plm@thephilanthropicmuseum.org, and more info found here http://www.thephilanthropicmuseum.org/.

Artist statement

The Bug is a creation inspired by two reasons (1) my personal inability to reconcile my fascination with Buddhism alongside my upbringing as a Khmer Muslim woman and (2) an attempt to capture a quickly changing Cambodian urban and rural landscape. The project is a culmination of my thematic interest in hybridity, transcendence, and otherness. Through an interdisciplinary approach, my work maps new political and spiritual landscapes. Meters and meters of textile act as skin, as a way for the surface of my body to extend into public spaces, and as a metaphoric device for stories to spread across an expanse.

For me, the Bug is created from a sense of play and curiosity. S/he is a displaced creature destined to travel and wander amidst the “in-between”. This space, which exists between who s/he is and where s/he is, is in fact a powerful place for encounter, habitation and reinvention. The Bug is created as an assertion of paradoxes, a result of a hybrid refugee experience, embodying the fluctuating inside/outside perspective of the transnational being. S/he longs for stillness while on a constant journey. S/he is a source for refuge while on a perpetual search for home. S/he is both a bridge and obstacle. S/he is a creature belonging in this world yet appearing to be from another universe.

At the heart of my work is an interest in developing stories, usually narratives that exist outside of conventions. The Buddhist Bug Project continues a methodology in which personal narratives shape my art. I believe performing narratives is an act of social engagement that contributes to collective healing. For me, performance and storytelling become ways of bridging the interior and exterior space of self as well as initiate critical dialogues between communities and institutions. My interdisciplinary works attempt to find crucial intersections between performing narratives and audience engagement.
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source: seasonofcambodiaorg

Anida Yoeu Ali is an artist whose works span performance, installation, video, poetry, 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 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. Her pioneering work with the critically acclaimed group “I Was Born With Two Tongues (1998-2003)” is archived with the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Program. Her artistic work has been the recipient of grants from the Rockefeller Foundation, Ford Foundation, the National Endowment of the Arts and the Illinois Arts Council. Anida 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 collaborative partner with Studio Revolt, an independent artist run media lab in Phnom Penh, Cambodia where she currently resides.
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source: swingingphnompenh

Anida Yoeu Ali was born in 1973 in Battabang (north-west of Cambodia) to a Cambodian, Cham (Muslim minority in Cambodia), Thai, and Malaysian family. During the war, they took refuge in a Thai camp before seeking exile in the USA. They settled down in Chicago, where Anida grew up and has lived for more than 30 years. She is a creative artist and works on video, sound, performances and dance. She graduated in 1996 from Illinois University with a BFA in graphic design and in 2000 from the Artistic Institute of Chicago with a MFA in Studio Arts Performance.

Anida Initiates and participates in several collaboratives projects ; I Was Born With Two Tongues, (thanks to which she was named in the 20 most influencial Asian-Americans by A. Magazine) and is involved in the Asian-American women group Mango Tribe, which gives poetry performances on stage, and go on tour in the whole country. She also launched the APIA Spoken Word & Poetry Summit.

The fear and hatred atmosphere after 9/11 influenced her and led her to conceive the 1700% Project: Mistaken for Muslim, with Masahiro Sugano, a japanese filmmaker. This viral video juxtaposes pictures of Muslims with a poem written by Anida, about several racists attacks that happened at that time. This video won the One Chicago, One Nation Online Video Contest’s grand prize.

Anida came back in her motherland in 2004 and made regular trips there until 2011. On that year, she received a fellowship to do some research focused on creation mythologies and birthing stories of Khmer women and decided to settle inCambodia with her family. With the help of her husband Sugano, she founded Studio Revolt, an artistic laboratory where they work together on videos projects, installations and performances.

That’s how they continue an artwork they started in the USA, the Bouddhist Bug Project. They make in situ installations in the streets of Phnom Penh, in a restaurant, etc. where Anida plays the role of the head of a giant orange worm made in fabrics. A personal way to question her identity, religion and the changing of urban landscapes.

At the same time, she continues her work on American deportees ; refugee’s children who are deported in Cambodia if they are convicted of crimes or minor offences, according to the 2002 immigration laws. In her video My Asian Americana, the activist shows women and men that were born and grew up in the USA and were sent to a country they didn’t know.

A selection of her work will be displayed during her tour, Generation Return, in university campuses and places of the Cambodian diaspora in the USA and in Canada. An other selection of her work will be displayed in New York for Season of Cambodia, a cultural festival that takes place in April and May.