 Today, I have the great honor to introduce someone who I believe embodies this very essence of creating space for critical dialogues. She is a fighter, she is a fighter activist, she is a lover, she is a questioner and brings into light those tough dialogue through artistic expressions as an artist scholar. I'd like to introduce Anita Yu Ali, renowned multimedia interdisciplinary artist, spoken word poet, scholar, community activist and global agitator. She is here today to present some of her works through a multimedia show that highlights contemporary justice, justice issues within Cambodian American communities. Anita is a first generation Cambodian American, Khmer Muslim woman born in Cambodia, raised in Chicago and has lived overseas for parts of her life. Her transnational and multi-ethnic, multicultural identities speaks volumes in her interdisciplinary works. Currently, she is an artist in residence at the University of Bothells Campus School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences. She teaches courses on global agitation, art and activism, contemporary Muslim artists, performing diaspora and Southeast Asian hip hop and urban arts. She has an MFA from the School of Art of Institute Chicago and a BFA from the University of Illinois, a Fulbright scholar. And she continues to showcase her work globally, bringing discourse and provocative expression to her audience. Taken from her bio on the UW's website, this really spoke to me. I believe merrily expressing the human condition is not enough. Expression must be combined with engagement to fuel public discourse on critical issues. I wouldn't do her justice if I don't share a couple of her works that she's recently done. So she's had some exhibits titled The Red Shador. What is it that you fear? This is gonna be featuring later on this year in Australia. It's traveled to Paris, San Francisco, Washington, D.C. and the Smithsonian Museum. Some other works that I can speak upon are transcending the in-between, the Buddhist bug. I was born with two tongues, with a pioneering spoken word group and many, many more that you can find also on her website. So at this time, I would like to call Bong Anitta Yu Ali to the stage. And I want you all to help me give a round of applause to help welcome her. I want to begin with this quote that has inspired me as we think about the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. For me, this quote speaks to my work and what it stands against. The whole point of art, the whole definition of art centers around creation. It's the act of creation. It is the counter to destruction. It is the counter to war. Art, in its essence, creates life, creates dialogue, creates critical thinking. So this quote to me really stood out. Every man, let's say human, must decide whether he will walk in the light of creative altruism or in the darkness of destructive selfishness. This was Dr. Martin Luther King. And I want to begin with my poetry, with the roots of my work, narrative work. It was through spoken word poetry. It was through writing and telling my stories and finally having the guts to speak. You know, after being told for so long of feeling a kind of passiveness, a kind of not good enough to speak in a classroom filled with white students. In a classroom filled with privilege. For so long, I sort of bore that burden and didn't realize, you know, the beauty of my story, of my family's history, of my relevance, of my validity. I found that in spoken word. And I found that in the courage to tell original stories on stage. And it was then that I saw other people who then saw me. That reflection is deeply important and drives me every day. How powerful it is to see images of ourselves, to see our stories reflected, whether it's on the big screen or the little stage in our classrooms, in our textbooks. Um... Everyone here has a name. And for many of us, our names have been butchered, rendered unpronounceable. So I want to begin with this poem. It's called, What's in a Name? I want you all right now to say your names. Tell me your names. Let's do it again. Tell me your names. Yeah, so we got to own our names. Um... My name is 2,000 years of history present in one body, three decades of civil unrest awake in three syllables, five letters dense of birth, blood, Islam, peace, Khmer, story, two letters away from refugee, one letter short of home. My name knows my mother labored, screaming for hours only to mourn a year later as she buried her sorrow, a baby boy empty of breast milk, born into famine instead of family. Two letters in war separate the difference. My mother buried her pains from that first labor, along with her grief, and her son had learned the word for hunger before he was able to call her mother or speak her name. She labored a second time, and my name was born. My name unexpectedly inherited first child honors. My name echoes the same shahada whispered to early newborns, curves legacy into intricate ancient mountains, and escapes from a land kissed by American bombs. When you say my name, it is a prayer, a mantra, a call. When you say my name, when you whisper it, when you cry it, when you desire it, I respond. Before countries bounded themselves into borders, before cities became governments, and even before the nations of hip-hop, it is the original call and response that all peoples claim. I take issue with your inarticulate mangling of my name. She refuses to disintegrate into a colonized tongue. My name survived racism before she knew what it was called. A small child sinks deeper into her seat, into her shame, into her difference, into their laughter, into their stares, into their sneers, into a classroom of white kids, with white teachers, with white tongues, with perfectly pronounceable white American names like Katie, Courtney, Jennifer, Michael, Bobby, Doug, Mrs. Smith, Mrs. Nelson, Mr. ... How do you say your weird name again, Miss? I'm sorry, I just can't seem to say it right. Every mispronunciation is like a mouth shooting bullets. The spit of syllables building from a gullet turned barrel triggers precise memories attached to precise feelings like shame inflected in my parents' broken English with the guilt of witnessing daily sacrifices by my mother and father, their dreams and youth slaughtered for money, food, my very perfect English. Every misplaced tongue targets my foreigners, my unbelonging, my vulnerabilities. So when I get angry or curse you for your mispronunciation, please don't tell me I can't do that. Don't tell me to take it easy. Don't hold me afterwards for making a point of it in public. Don't downplay my childhood wounds. Don't shrink me down any further. Please, just listen. Allow me to own this one thing, the rights to my name, to say her correctly, to have her said correctly, to come when she calls me, to come to her defense, to live up to her, to honor her legacy. She is the only refuge when I am stripped naked. She is my bloodline to mothers who have labored before me. She is my name, the echo of home I long to remember. My name is Anita, the daughter of Suraya, who is the daughter of Abida, who is the daughter of Fatima, who is the daughter of a woman whose name I do not know, who are all daughters of Hawa Eve, daughters of life, sisters of survival, women of resistance, daughters of the earth, water, breath, fire, dreams. I wrote that poem in response to somebody telling me I couldn't correct them. It was a person who was introducing me in a large auditorium and I made it a point to correct the individual and then she scolded me after my performance that I should not have done that in public. So I wrote this poem in response, which is what I tend to do. Something happens, it triggers me to using my art to addressing it. That is my outlet. And obviously writing the poem brought me back to other places, to other spaces where the denial of your identity was very clear. So I offer you that poem and I wanted to offer a few more poems. I don't have baby photos because I was born in Cambodia and when I was three years old in the mid-1970s, the Khmer Rouge, a genocidal regime that did a horrendous social experiment on the country trying to eliminate the country, which was developing and modernizing incredible pace, post-independence from the French. They tried to eliminate western ideology, modernization, and create a government that's based on Maoist policies and a kind of communism that was really detrimental. It wasn't true to communism. It was really about power and the subjugation of everyone else. It's a very complex history, but to break it down, I was just a child. I was three years old and the Khmer Rouge decided that they would turn the country back to what's called the year zero. It would start all over with the country and that meant emptying all the cities of people and that meant eliminating people that could possibly be smart enough to descend, but also just people who they felt couldn't be part of this new country. Many people who appeared a certain way, it got very hysterical to the point of if you were a professional, you were targeted either for execution or to work in these labor camps where you had to work in the rice fields for nearly the entire day and night with very, very little to eat. Massive starvation happened. People lost everything. People lost their homes and people lost their families. People would disappear due to these random executions. My father was targeted a couple times and more so they also eliminated people who overtly showed their religion. My family is an ethnic minority and we are Muslim. We've been Muslim for generations and our family was targeted as was our village and commune and my father survived the execution twice. They came for him two times and it was by the grace of kind people and his truth telling them that he was a teacher so that already targeted him because they were eliminating professionals, doctors, teachers, nurses. But he said he was a teacher a while back and he couldn't find a lot of work so he is a fisherman. He told the truth and that saved him in that moment. A second time we had friends who helped him kind of leave the area as they were coming for him to take him away and literally beat him to death because they didn't want to waste bullets on people so they would rather bludgeon you to death. This happened to the point of a quarter of the population dying as a result. So we are talking about millions of people and this story of mine is just one of the millions of stories that are very, very similar. This is why I work very hard to counter violence, to speak out against war, against genocide, against just the wrong doings of everyday life. If I see something that's wrong, that's out of place, I handle it. There's no way that I would look away. I can't do that. And my religion, Islam, has also taught me that. This is what a lot of people also don't realize and I think I'm in a very unique intersectionality of my identities to kind of bring all of this together as the rise of Islamophobia is happening. Because I'm able to talk about being a Muslim and counter the stereotypes that people have. You look at me, you probably don't think that I'm a Muslim nor do you think that I come from a long lineage of Muslims. You probably think, oh when did she convert or really there are Muslims over there? Well yes, because in Southeast Asia has one of the largest Muslim populations in the world. We're talking about Indonesia and Malaysia. So anyways, all this was to tell you about my family photo which I don't have any of except for the photos that were taken of us in 1979 in the refugee camps. After the borders reopened in 1979 and the North Vietnamese forces who had just won from the US who were already depleted and full of their own sorrow came into Phnom Penh to liberate Cambodia and the Cambodian people from the Khmer Rouge because Khmer Rouge were going to make their way into Vietnam if they hadn't stopped them at that point. So when we got word about that my family walked for hundreds of miles to the border of Thailand where they found refuge in the refugee camps. Obviously you're probably hearing similarities to what is going on currently with a massive refugee crisis around the world but in particular in Syria and Afghanistan and Iraq. Again, my family history, my stories and unraveling what has happened on a personal level to my family has informed me to taking certain stances today to living and being and believing with compassion and empathy which is really important for me in all my work. So I want to share with you the next series of poems and I'm going to just replay this video which is an animation of barbed wires which is the thing that I remember most about the refugee camps. They were cordured off with barbed wires. This is for Cambodia. An ancient land of dreamers and builders sorrow and strength. This is for those who keep our culture alive for the hidden Apsara in all of us beauty beneath brown flesh for the fingers arched towards God this is for all the children of Cambodia for those who left and those who never chose the leaving this is for those who made new homes in far away places this is for everything that we are and everything that we are becoming we are the ones who will keep our culture alive. We arrived at the camps with nothing but the clothes on our backs I remember my five-year-old fingers gripping the back of my father's wet neck arms locked like strands of rope a noose at times tightening and loosening to the noises in the jungle my legs wrapped around his back bending and branching like fresh jungle twigs he told me it was a game and at times we'd have to run sometimes running so fast my legs swung loosely knees beating against his back and how he sweated all those miles away shirt soaked in trembling heartbeat even the thick foliage couldn't guard us from the scent of fear that loitered around us couldn't shield us from the torch in the sky that followed us everywhere until the night swallowed itself into the moon couldn't silence the way the darkness teased us with the imagined limbs of lost children the illusions cracking as we stepped on brittle branches there was no time for hesitations only slivers of moments when we waited for the night to slip faster into the day how my father's feet screamed a silent din which never quite rose above that jungle canopy his legs like iron pegs burning at the stump with each step walking, running, always running and how he heaved me on his back all those miles make believing it was just another father-daughter game a piggyback ride he said the last piggyback ride he whispered and when it was over he promised me we would never have to leave again body, speak to me speak my name tell me of my truths of how my body frames me in her own borders and I keep convincing myself that nobody owns me I remember ancestors I remember my people that I was born in the age of 18 that I was the one who was born I was the one who was born I was given the right to have to live and I was given the right to have to be alive I remember ancestors, memories into flesh, earth into flesh, fire into flesh, breath into flesh, water into flesh, dreams into flesh, history into flesh. Given, the Khmer Rouge regime lasted three years, eight months, and 20 days. Given, nearly every single family in Cambodia suffered losses during the time of the Khmer Rouge. Given, individuals who return home are not the same people they were when they left. So prove, absence is what the body aches to remember. Prove, survivors must learn to live with the absence of two million deaths. Prove, the journey never ends for the refugee. Prove, my father says, there is nothing to go back to. This is our home. So 25 years later, I returned to Cambodia for the very first time as a 30-year-old adult by myself. And this is the poem that I wrote in anticipation to that first step back to what one may call a homeland. And this is, of course, that diasporic dilemma, this longing and aching for home identity, the transnational struggle of both being here and there and neither there nor here. I will return to a country I have never known that burns a hole inside my heart, the size of home. When I arrive, will I recognize loss if she came to greet me at the airport? Will she help me with my bags, usher me through customs? Will she take me to my birth village, point me to the graves of ancestors? Will she share her silence with me? Will she embrace me? Will I ask these same questions? Or will I be asked to prove my belonging? Do I begin by pulling out remnants of my broken tongue, hunt for similarities in a sea of strangers, spot the same cheekbones on a little girl as she smiles, selling little meaningless trinkets, close in on an old man with a nose brought in brown and rounded soft, catch a familiar scowl from an ashy-haired woman who sees me first? Or will I need to look even deeper, scan for eyes gouged with the same obsidian tint of regret as mine? Consider textures on dry flesh that easily flinches in a forest of touch. Watch for veins beneath the wrists that have stared down the teeth of razors. Trace cracked lines on open callous palms. Do I stitch a patchwork of resemblances to justify my birthright? Or will I be at a loss for words? I wonder once I have visited loss. Will she stamp my exit visa? I often think about our leaving and all we left behind. Imagined our lives without this exodus, dreamt of days when I could speak to loss to tell her, we didn't choose to leave. We didn't choose to leave. We didn't choose to leave. The leaving chose us. The leaving chose us to the earth they have come and to the earth they shall return. So those are some of the works from that spoken word period in my life that really has started my artistic journey. That was a long time ago, starting in 1998. Please don't tell me you were born around that time. But that work was about identity and place, narrative voice, hybridity, and, of course, this notion of social justice. Social justice being a fight for equality. And always my work is about the search for beauty and truths. A lot of it with the poetry is rooted in the kind of student activism that I did in the 90s at a time when we didn't have things like ethnic studies and Asian-American studies, or that was very new in terms of being in the Midwest of the US and the East Coast. So a lot of that work, as a student, as being part of different artistic moments, really fueled the work that you just heard from the spoken word period. It was part of a group called I Was Born With Two Tongues. And we toured hundreds and hundreds of schools in the late 90s and made a name for ourself, but more importantly, we allowed people to see reflections of themselves, of possible reflections of themselves, of Asian-Pacific Islander people who identified in different ways stories, but also a political voice. This idea of standing with other communities that were going through different kinds of oppressions. For us, people who would see us perform on stages, or in clubs, or even in bars, because that's where spoken word really took off if you're familiar with the slam scene. But we'd also face ridiculous comments like, wow, I didn't realize you guys could speak such good English. Or how did you do that rap so well? Things like that, that was constant. These, I think, what we're calling microaggressions now, felt very macro then. So with that journey, I was also part of Mangle Tribe, which is a fierce group of Asian-American women taking to the stage with multimedia theater. And then I really broke away from the different groups that I was part of in trying to make a name for myself. And plus it was easier just to work by yourself. That's what I learned with the collaborative process. It's painful. It's painful with women. Everything has to be consensus. I realize I'm kind of a dictator. So solo work was the direction for this artist later on. And as I told you all, these are my baby photos. This is my mother and my brother, who she almost died giving birth to during the Khmer Rouge period because there were no doctors or hospitals. She almost bled to death. That is the barbed wires that I remember and that I took as inspiration to create the animation that you saw earlier. And this here, I am in this photo, the little redhead right here, by the care package, the box. We have family in Thailand that came and found us and got word to my grandfather, who was out already. And that's how we were able to leave the camps to come to the US and landed in Chicago. And Chicago is really where I spent a lot of my time. And I'm going to play for you one of the videos from this period because I think it's important to recognize intersectionality and the way that history is repeating itself. We get amnesia oftentimes. And so this piece was actually created in 2003. And 2003, of course, comes after September 11, 2001. During this time, the rate of hate crimes against Muslims had jumped up tremendously the period right after 9-11 when hate crimes were starting to be documented and archived. The numbers jumped for those who were Muslims and perceived as Muslims to 1,700%. 1,700%. That's not doubling. That's 1,700%. It was so much so that the FBI in 2003 created the first ever Arab-American Advisory Committee following this recognition of this tremendous increase. So I created this video with my filmmaker partner called Mistaken for Muslim. And I will share it with you guys. You can also find it online. But in this piece, I start with an epigraph. And that epigraph recognizes Executive Order 9066. How many of you have learned about Executive Order 9066? Good. But not enough of you. How many of you know about what happened to the Japanese-Americans in the 1940s? So the barbed wires that you saw earlier, that visual motif should come into play right about now if you're thinking about Japanese internments. And so this begins with that epigraph so that the hope is that we do not repeat history. But of course, we know something dreadful may happen because of campaign promises to ban Muslims and to make a registry. And some people have even said that because they interned the Japanese during this period, that there is precedent to put away a group of people based merely on their identities. We cannot let that happen. Awoke to signs, terrorists sprayed in red paint across their family's driveway. Terrorists on board, written on their white car. Awoke to find, freeway sign says, kill all Arabs. Elevator sign says, kill all towel heads. A Pakistani living in LA awoke to find his car scratched across the right side with the words, nukem. Awoke to find, 300 march on a mosque in Bridgeview, Illinois. 300 American flags shout, USA, USA. Mosque awoke to find a 19-year-old shouting, I am proud to be American. I hate Arabs, and I always have. Fire bomb toss, taxi driver pulled out and beaten. Vandals in Collingswood, New Jersey attacked two Indian-owned businesses. Vandals spray-painted, leave town. Awoke to find a South Asian American Sikh chased by a group of four men yelling, terrorist. Sikh, mistaken for Muslim. Back up, Sikh man 69 shot, body found in a canal he had a turban on. Turban, mistaken for Muslim. A vehicle of white males followed and harassed a 21-year-old female. Attackers yelled, go back to your own country. The attackers carpenter against another vehicle, then they backed up and ran over her again. Kimberly, a 21-year-old. Back up, a 21-year-old. Full blood, creak back up. Full blood, creak Native American, mistaken for Muslim. Awoke to find a Pakistani native beaten by three men. Back up, Egyptian American 48 killed, point blank. Back up, Sikh man 49 shot, shooter shouted, I stand for America all the way. Back up, a man pushing a baby stroller walked by a mosque. He stopped and started yelling, you Islamic mosquitoes should be killed. Mosquito, mistaken for Muslim. Awoke to find two women speaking Spanish in a doctor's office. Another woman yells, you foreigners caused all this trouble. Spanish speaker beaten, Spanish mistaken for Muslim. Awoke to be mistaken. A woman wearing Muslim clothing was shopping. A Caucasian woman began attacking her and shouts, America is only for white people. Back up, America mistaken for white people. Armed man sets fire to a Seattle mosque. 300 march and a mosque in Bridgetown, Illinois. Mosque in Texas attacked. Some student in Arizona State University attacked and restaurant in Fremont attacked. Five suspects wrote die on a Persian club. A gasoline bomb is thrown through the window of a Sikh family's home, hitting a three-year-old's head. Two women at a bagel store attacked for wearing Quranic charm around her neck. Attack her lunges and yells, look what you people have done to my people. No one in the store tried to help. Two women awoke to find an explosion from a cherry bomb outside the Islamic center of San Diego. San Diego mistaken for Muslim. Look what you people have done to my people. 300 march on a mosque in Bridgeview, Illinois. No one tried to help. Sign says, kill all Arabs. Sign says, kill all towel heads, towels mistaken for Muslim. No one tried to help. Vandals attacked. No one tried to help. He had a turban on. No one tried to help. Sign says, look what you people have done. Flags waving in Africa and restaurant. 300 march against Spanish, spoken at a doctor's office. Spanish mistaken for Muslim. 300 march on two women at a bagel store. Bagels mistaken for Muslim. 300 wave cherry bombs. March on 300 seats hitting a three-year-old in the head. Look what you people have done. So all the words that you heard there, I did not make up. Those are filed hate crime reports. Filed hate crime reports on people who were perceived to be Muslims or were Muslims. What I did was, of course, recompose the text into an original poem. All of the people in there, the portraits, are all people who self-identify as Muslims in the Chicagoland area and volunteered to be part of this project. The work is called 1700% Project Mistaken for Muslim. And you can find that online. People who need to leave can go ahead and leave now. I understand that this is a break for people who need to get to their classes. Students who are in my course from at UW-Bothel, you better not leave. I see some of you. So as you can see with the themes in this work, I'm very interested in intersectionality. I am interested in hybridity. I'm interested in hybridity in using multiple ways of layering, whether it's layering of stories to whether it's layering of art forms. So for example, within that video, it was a real break from my work as a live performer, as a spoken word artist, as someone who used to be able to memorize poems and deliver it really quickly, and into this form of a video, the genre of spoken word videos. And you adjust to the things that happen in your life. And at the time, I had just given birth to my first daughter. And that meant I couldn't tour as much. I physically could not leave my baby. And so the video form was really, for me, an exercise of how can I take my work to a broader audience without leaving. And thus, this creative collaboration with my partner, Masahiro Sugano, who is a filmmaker, and bringing the spoken word into videos. There are many other videos, and you can look for it on our Media Lab site, which is Studio Revolt, and that's studio-revolt.com. And this video, mistaken for Muslim, actually won a grand prize award for an online film competition to which we were almost disqualified. So the irony of it all, they felt that initially our video may have been too political and therefore not fitting what they wanted, which was a happy, joyous celebration of diversity. And I said, well, but this is. And of course fought for it, and it got to the judges and unanimously won. So there is, you have to really believe in what you do, and you do it with integrity is always something I hold on to in everything that I do. So with the integrity, though, comes complications. With the political voice comes obstacles. And a part of this project, because it's a multidisciplinary project. And it became, oops, I gave it away. So I don't know why this is a little bit timer. So the poem actually exists also as a gallery piece. Why would I want to put this poem in a gallery piece, in a gallery space? Well, for the very reason that I know very well who goes to galleries. I actually saw no diversity in the gallery that we were exhibiting at, except for some of the students. It was a very set audience that comes through these sort of gallery spaces. And I wanted to play with that. And I was aware of that. I wanted to bring some politics, some anger, some unnerving of folks. And so I made the poem into this, which is the poem, put as white vinyl on a white wall, where you can only read it if performers stain it. So here we go. So I had four people from the community help embody the poem. I'm sorry, the thing is going a little wacko. I don't know why it jumps like that. OK, so the poem, all right, we'll do this. We'll do it this way. There's the poem. Each week, the performer, the four performers come. They have memorized the poem. I've choreographed it in a way of how they should deliver it. So once they deliver, these four people deliver the poem that you just heard in the video. Then they turn around. They pick up their bowls of stain. And they start to engage with the wall, to stain the wall. And you can only read the wall once it's completely stained. And once it's stained, the words become more visible. And after that stage, the idea was you peel off the letters. And so the stenciling remains. And what is this about? This is about you. You can't erase what's happened in our history. We can't just paint over it. There's something there that will always be residual stain. We have to just figure out how we're going to acknowledge and live coexist with the stain that marks our history. So that was the idea. But a couple of weeks into it, the work was vandalized. So somebody came and took the materials that were there and created this caricature on the wall and circled the areas of text that said, kill all Arabs. And I was devastated. This was my MFA thesis work at School of the Art Institute. In the school's 150-year history, no one has ever had their work vandalized, until me. And the school didn't respond in the way that I wanted them to respond. I wanted them to have a zero-tolerance policy on this kind of it. Obviously, this most likely was another student, most likely in this gallery space that's guarded, that has security cameras. I mean, the school didn't investigate. And it wasn't until I had help from the Arab legal defense stepping in and recognizing that this was an act of hate that the school finally said something, acknowledged. They acknowledged it was vandalism. They didn't acknowledge that it was hate crime. And there was public attention on it with CNN and the other national networks covering it. But more so, I was devastated. This was 2010. I've already had decades of working with this volatility. And why does my work have to be attacked? And in so oftentimes, when you're dealing with political identity, you can't help but think that you're being attacked because it is an extension of your identity. So it really devastated me. And only because also I had to put the labor into the public response. The school wasn't going to help me. I had to figure out what to do to save my work because now it's got a disruption. Somebody came and decided that they didn't like the work. They had a problem with the work. But instead of engaging in a dialogue, they shut the piece down. So I decided with a group of professors that were not related to the school. I actually went out to my communities and handpicked people that I thought could facilitate a public discussion on it. I didn't want at that point the school or the deans to be involved because they weren't doing anything. So I organized the public discussion and a lot of people came. And it's the most diverse you'll ever see this gallery space have. There were so many people from the Muslim community, from the Asian-American community, from the African-American community, the Latinos, really my diverse coalition of various parts of Chicago really came to the forefront of engaging in this and saying, we're going to stand up against this and you're going to hear our voices. That's really important. And obviously that's in the vein of the work of Dr. Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights Movement. If anything, we should know that the Civil Rights Movement had led the way for so many of us for the Asian-American yellow power movement, for the Chicano struggles. And those folks in the Civil Rights era worked together. It wasn't a solo venture. Yes, certain people became the leadership figures, but it was a coalition. It was really a broad-based group of people. So this is what the wall ended up looking like after the public reclaimed the mark. So we decided to restain it so that we would still have remnants of the defacement, but allow the work to age the way we wanted it to. And then the public also helped to peel all of the letters off. And then the work was able to be completed. But because at that point in my career, I just felt so destroyed in the US context that I wanted to run away. I was done. I was just like, I can't do this anymore. This is so soul-crushing. I need to get away. And that was when I actually was awarded the Fulbright, which was a nice happenstance. And of course, I said yes. And at that point, look, I was pregnant with baby number two. And I was thinking, what am I going to do? I can't give birth over there. That's crazy. I should stay here really. I should not take the Fulbright. We can't just up and leave. But also I felt like it was an opportunity of a lifetime to go back to Cambodia where my parents lived for so many decades and then for me to have that period of time there to do this research around performance would have been incredible. So we just packed up and left. And I delivered abroad and continued with the Fulbright and was so inspired by Cambodia that I stayed for five years and created some pretty amazing works with my partner. And so beauty and truth and all of that comes into play. When you're surrounded by such devastation and poverty and the residual stain of violence and trauma, you were looking for beauty. I think it's okay to try to find the place where those kinds of stories can emerge. And for Cambodia, it's through the arts and culture. It's through the preservation of these art forms in which we're almost annihilated because 90% of artists died during that period of time. 90%. A very slim amount of artists survived. And these are forms that are thousands of years old. So we lost a lot of art forms in that devastating period. So I would like to share this piece, which again is directed by my partner Masiro Sugano. And you could see. And it's a collaboration with Khmer Arts or Soapaline Arts Ensemble. And it tells the story of the Serpent Goddess and her story of attempting to assimilate. She has a very long tail, which has learned to live with this tremendous tail. Talking about with this pursuit of beauty and grace and trying to move away from a lot of the politically charged work that I was engaged in. But I would, of course, find a kind of beauty in the displacement that was happening in terms of my time in Cambodia and what I was carrying with me. So I was there with my partner. And one of the things that we noticed was really the question of where art happens in Cambodia, which is why in that short film for the Serpent Goddess, you saw that we took the dancer out into the public space of what appears to be a modernist structure. It's a big, not an auditorium. I call it like a field of like a arena. Thank you. An arena. And that, you know, Nang Net was also about how do you tell the story of a dance, a dance that's very codified. You can't just watch that dance and fully understand it. You can enjoy it for its beauty and its intricacies in the gestures. But it's hard to understand fully where it's coming from, where the gesture and where the story, the mythology is. And so that video was really about trying to tell that story to a broader audience through video, through the work of film and modernizing it. So in Cambodia, I ended up engaging in a lot of work, in performance-based works. And they ranged from pieces that included participation of local folks, fellow Cambodians, because I really felt that was missing. And some of the artists that were making a name for themselves in Cambodia in the region, they were emulating what they thought and where they thought art should happen, which is a white walled cube. This idea of you show in a gallery, you create work in a studio, you show in a gallery, and then the same group of people come to ooh and ah your work. And so that was not the kind of work I wanted to do. I actually have to plug in, because I guess I'm running low on batteries. So I, of course, am a performance artist, and I engage with the public all the time. I put my body out into public spaces. And for me, that is the opportunity for people to really engage with my body, whether it's about delivering a poem to a live audience or performance in the sense of performance art. And so in Cambodia, I really had the opportunity to engage. This is a project called Gallery X in which we took a slice of the gallery walls and put it in the middle of an open-air market. But before then, we took portraits of the people around there, because what happens in these developing countries or what you call third world is people from national geographic, they come in and they take photos of the locals. But the locals never get to see it or even get asked permission to participate, which I think is really problematic. And so this project here is not about that and is about that. This project here, Gallery X, is asking the locals to participate alongside the international community that are often the people that come to see these gallery shows, and asking for them to come and engage in this moment together and then showing the portraits in the very space that it was taken to the very community that it was taken. And so erecting these digital monitors that are left over a 24-hour period and these portraits never get seen outside of that. It's only in that moment. And that was repeated again in this Muslim community, which is a community I was born into. And then I've done other projects like crazy things, like pushing myself into the middle of traffic in front of dictator Hun Sen's house. And of course it didn't last very long because cops came. But things like that, this is about the public square. Where is the space of engagement for Cambodian people to have dialogue, to have moments of exchange in terms of speaking to artists and speaking with one another. And so one of the main themes of my work is of course diaspora and this idea of being in between. And so this, what you're looking at is the Buddhist bug project. The Buddhist bug is a really popular piece that's gone all over the world. And she is both Muslim and Buddhist. And she reflects what I felt the very first time I came to Cambodia, which was this amazing awe at the presence of Buddhism. The orange saffron robes that were everywhere. And for me, this really is about, wow, the realization that your family and your heritage is really minor in the scheme of what's going on around you. So 98% Buddhist, 2% Muslim, before the war it was 5%. So half of the Muslim population died in the genocide. And so it was really modeled after the Chador or the Hijab. And of course she's for me representing and fulfilling the ideas of modesty where she is fully covered. But of course it's strange, right? Cause she's a bug. She's a bug that doesn't know, that doesn't quite realize her difference. She goes into these spaces of Cambodia and thinks it's perfectly fine and wondering why are they all looking at her. And it's supposed to question what it means to be the other, what it means to be different. And so that's the Buddhist bug. And the final work in Cambodia for me is of course I couldn't escape the politics that I carried with me and the things that I'm known for. And so for me, working with the deportation, the deportees in Cambodia was really eye-opening and it's a return to what I was carrying with me from the US, this need to fight for justice. There is a group of people in Cambodia that have been deported there even though they have been raised their entire lives in the US. They were born in refugee camps, the same camp that I came from. They were born there, which is contested space in terms of your nationality, right? So these young folks were raised in the US and often in really awful situations with a lot of violence and where race wars were heavy. And they were often part of gangs and they fell into that life and into that cycle of violence. And so many of them committed crimes as a result and of course didn't have the kind of lawyers you would have to try to get you out of that or to tell your story properly or to even go through the right justice system. And so because of that felony that was on their records, some laws were passed and they were deported back to Cambodia, a country they had never been, that they had heard about. They don't even know a lot of Khmer, Cambodian language, but they ended up back in Cambodia. And so our lives intersected with this young man, Khosal Q, in a documentary that my husband made that I produced called Cambodian Sun. You can watch that on Vimeo if you pay a few bucks or if you invite me back. So I wanna wrap this up in terms of talking about justice and the role of justice, the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King and what he fought for and where I stand on it, which is we cannot continue to deport people in my eyes with the kind of process we're already engaged in. I feel it's inhumane. I feel that borders are unjustified. I feel that the history of civilization is such that migration is part of who we are. And for me, that means open borders. This specific case, of course, it's a lot more, a lot deeper in that these guys are being punished twice. These guys have already paid their debt to society. So let me be clear. They served their time in American prisons, 10 years, 13 years. They've been out living their life, paying taxes, going about, reforming themselves, having babies, getting married, and then ICE picks them up and sends them back, uproots them. They came here as a result of refugee policies. They came here because America bombed Cambodia in the secret bombings that Nixon ordered in the 1970s, leaving the country devastated politically and physically and economically, paving the way for the genocidal regime of the Khmer Rouge. America accepted these refugees and didn't put in place the programs needed to truly give them a better life. Right, so this some responsibility is what I'm saying, and you don't make someone pay twice as much as everyone else just because they don't have US citizenship. With that, I think we're gonna open it up to questions, but I wanted to just end with one last piece, which is the red-to-door. You might be seeing me around the Seattle area because after the announcement of President-elect Trump winning, this is what I decided to do. The Muslim is in the vein of the sanitation protests of the Civil Rights era, where they held up signs that said, I am a man. And this was during the time of Martin Luther King. He helped to organize that large protest. So again, I owe a lot to the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King and to the Civil Rights era and movement and all of the activists who have come before me and also all of the fierce artists who have come before me. I wanted to end with this powerful quote from Martin Luther King's I Have a Dream speech. We have also come to this hallowed spot to remind America of the fierce urgency of now. This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism. Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy. It would be fatal for the nation to overlook the urgency of the moment. And I believe we are in a critical situation where we need to recognize the urgency of now. It is eight years older than you. It's almost like calling an older brother and older sister. So just to give you guys some context to that. Hello. Hi. I'm David Davis. I'm part of the U-Motor program. For, I just wanted to ask for artists that have a lot of emotion bought up inside. What would be like the first step into expressing their emotions through the art? Like some people don't know how to do it. Some people don't know how to express how they're feeling. So how would you first, how would you, what would be the first step to like express how you're feeling with any art that you do? Do you get it out? You just gotta get it out. It's like giving birth, but not. You have it in you. And especially if you pay attention to those feelings, right? Those feelings have to find a way out. And what better way to do that than through art? Whether that means picking up a pen and writing or picking up a pencil and sketching or going to an open mic and getting up there, whether it's singing. One thing that I stress in my class is I know that the students that come into my class are not all artists, except that for me, I say that in my class, you get to be artists. In my class, I actually push you to engage creatively. That I grade on creative effort. I grade on risk-taking. I grade on the fact that I want to hear and feel you. And I want you to show and share that because we know in our education system that creativity gets locked up, right? Like, we lose it. We're already losing it in the way that public education is run in elementary schools. You want to get art class like once a week if you're lucky, that's insane. And now we're about to get this crazy cabinet member. Hope you guys are paying attention to that. Who is anti-public education, by the way? So I encourage you to listen to the voices inside yourself. All it takes is that first step. And you have to be brave enough to take that first step. No matter how small or big as an artist, that if you feel it, let it out. I see that you, in your work, capture a lot of different contradictions of culture and styles and old and new. What's your favorite contradiction that you have captured? What's my favorite contradiction? What's your favorite contradiction of mine? What did you see? Well, I really like the way that you do the old and the new. Like, when you went back to Cambodia and you didn't just try to capture all of the old culture, like you said, all the artists, or like 90% of the artists had died, but you really did bring in the culture of the people who had been deported and the culture of you yourself who was displaced and you brought in the new and you synthesized it with the old. But you put it next to each other, too, so it was juxtaposed. Yeah, that's a really good insight. I think I do that because of the nature of the hybridity of the work. I'm really interested in that juxtaposition, right? Whether it's the juxtaposition of identities or time or art forms. It's sort of, the things that I hear and see like that you all aren't exposed to is really loud in my voice, in my body. There are many things happening and when I actually make the work, I have to shuffle through all of that and try to make sense out of it and quiet certain areas, right? So that's why you see what to me is a lot of things thrown in there, but I'm trying to make sense of it so that it's not so overwhelming. So for me, I think the very nature of who I am because of the complexity of my identity and my history, my geography, my political identities, that's what emerges is that uniqueness of what I can put together side by side by side by side by side because that's the only way you can create a complexity. That's what we're trying to add to. There's so much flattening of identities, of peoples. It's so easy to have little news bites that just flatten everybody, flatten situations, make us dumb and I don't believe in that. I believe that if you change things up and you work with a kind of body of work that can physically show the complexities that don't always make sense easily, I think that opens up people's imagination more. The possibility of existing in a way that is beyond what somebody could pigeonhole you to being is really important for me. Hello. Hi. In your Buddhist back project, why did you choose to perform in the color of orange? It is the color of the saffron monk robes. When I first got to Southeast Asia, it was actually through Chiang Mai, Thailand and then a few months later I was in Vietnam and I never got to Cambodia during that time until like two years later. But at that time I just saw a lot of Buddhist monks and I would secretly take their photos with a camera that wasn't digital, if you could imagine that. And I would take Buddhist monks who were on their cell phone, who were on a boat, who were traveling across the beach, who were bathing in a waterfall. So all these things that I thought were just so interesting and curious and accepted. Like Buddhist monks are everywhere and you see this visually. Their presence is beautiful, it really reminds you of what that culture and country is rooted in. And then for me, obviously it reminded me of my difference because I didn't grow up in a Buddhist-centric culture. I grew up as a Muslim. So it was that combination that she talked about. I had been thinking about this idea of this diasporic dilemma that I talked about earlier. And for me it was I'm gonna put the Buddhist influence, this inspiration of the orange, which is one of my favorite colors, together with my Muslim identity. How am I gonna do this? How am I gonna do this? My kid was playing with this play tunnel that we got as a gift. She kind of would take it and spread it out and I would be amazed by this tunnel. And I would be like, this is crazy. I love this structure. How can I recreate this? Bingo, that's the Buddhist bug. So inspiration happens in interesting ways, right? And that young lady had pointed out the way I put things together and that uniqueness. And so that's what I mean. For those years that I was taking those secret photos, I didn't know where that was going. All those years I grew up as a Muslim, I didn't know where that was going. Having a baby play with a play tunnel, I put those things together and gave birth to this Buddhist bug project that's got a life of its own now. And I keep building on that narrative. The bug's narrative is constantly shifting and changing as I take that step to creating. Because once you take that step, more things open up. And you just start to go in that direction and then you start to make art. Thing else.