Anida Yoeu Ali: Hybrid Skin, Mythical Presence

A creation myth springing from her interest in transcendence, humor, and spiritual turmoil, The Buddhist Bug comprises a huge saffron-colored creature that Ali enacts in performance. Extending nearly 328 feet in length, at one end is a human face tightly encircled in cloth, and at the other a pair of feet. This transportable construction reflects the contradictory experiences of displacement and belonging, exploring Ali’s complex relationship between Cambodia and her own transnational identity. Its bright orange color is the same one worn by Buddhist monks and represents Cambodia’s dominant Buddhist culture, while the cloth that tightly encircles the Bug’s female face represents both the hijab worn by some Muslim women and the ethnic minority of Cambodian Muslims to which Ali and her family belong.

Ali’s expansive performance project takes shape through live engagement, photography, and video set amongst everyday Cambodian people in ordinary moments, in which the presence of The Buddhist Bug provokes 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. When brought to life by human performance, The Buddhist Bug becomes a site of play and discovery, inhabiting the diasporic dilemma of memory and reinvention.

Responding to a global rise of Islamophobia, misogyny, and racism, The Red Chador is an ongoing series of silent public performances that challenge perceptions and fears of the “other.” Ali challenges fearful responses to a figure in a chador, a large cloth worn as a head covering, veil, and shawl worn by some Muslim women. More than simply an item of clothing, this work is an allegory for the hypervisibility of Muslim women and a means to activate critical conversations on identity. While wearing the sparkling red chador, Ali transforms into her alter ego, engaging an unsuspecting public through small interactions that evolve alongside society’s changing political and cultural landscapes. 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 proud Muslim women to collectively gather and exist for all to see.

Anida Yoeu Ali (b. 1974, Battambang, Cambodia) 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.

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