Visions & Voices: Archival Intimacies: Queering South/east Asian Diasporas

Archival Intimacies: Queering South/east Asian Diasporas

DATE: Thursday, March 3, 2022 at 6 p.m.

LOCATION: ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives at the USC Libraries

TYPE: Screening, Performance, Diversity, Conversation

GENRE: Cinematic Arts, Art & design

DESCRIPTION:
Join us for an evening of new performances and film screenings by Vinhay Keo and Prima Jalichandra-Sakuntabhai, Los Angeles–based transdisciplinary artists who explore South/east Asian queer diasporas and the complexities of history, identity, and belonging. The event will include a conversation with the artists, independent curator Aziz Sohail, and USC Dornsife College American studies and ethnicity professor Nayan Shah.

In conjunction with the event, the USC Libraries will present an exhibition of materials from the ONE Archives and Satrang, a community organization that has supported South Asian and Southeast Asian LGBTQ communities in Southern California since 1997. Archival Intimacies will show diverse perspectives from artists, scholars, students, archivists, and community members on queering South/east Asian histories and experiences.

Bios:

The performative lectures and site-specific installations of Prima Jalichandra-Sakuntabhai address the structures of eurocentric masculine power in space and architecture, and take apart the physical and structural tools of the Western academic. Jalichandra-Sakuntabhai was a recipient of the SOMA Summer Award in Mexico City in 2016 and the emi kuriyama spirit award in 2020.

Vinhay Keo is an interdisciplinary artist and researcher whose photography, video, installation, performance, sculpture, and writing interrogate the effects of intergenerational trauma from the Vietnam War, Khmer Rouge genocide, French colonialism in Indochina, and queer temporality. He is a recipient of the Ellen Battell Stoeckel Fellowship, Louisville Visual Art’s Rising Star Award, and a Great Meadows Foundation grant.

Nayan Shah is a professor of American studies and ethnicity and history at USC. He is the author of Contagious Divides (2001) and Stranger Intimacy (2012), and a recipient of fellowships and grants from the Rockefeller Foundation, von Humboldt Foundation, and Freeman Foundation.

Aziz Sohail is an art curator, writer, and researcher who promotes under-researched histories and builds interdisciplinary connections between art, history, archive, fiction, theory, and biography. He has been a curator-in-residence at the New Art Gallery Walsall and the Nepal Picture Library, and was part of Curatorial Intensive South Asia 2018 at Khoj in New Delhi and the Young Curators Academy at Herbstsalon 2019 in Berlin.

Presented by USC Visions and Voices: The Arts and Humanities Initiative. Organized by Alexis Bard Johnson (USC Libraries).