In the Absence of Memories…There Are Fragments
Dena Al-Adeeb, Eleana Antonaki,
Ali Shrago-Spechler, Tiffany Smith, and Betty Yu
October 21 – November 20, 2022
Opening Reception: Friday, Oct. 21st, 6-8 pm
Transmitter Gallery is pleased to present In the Absence of Memories…There Are Fragments, a group exhibition featuring works by Dena Al-Adeeb, Eleana Antonaki, Ali Shrago-Spechler, Tiffany Smith, and Betty Yu.
In the Absence of Memories…There Are Fragments proposes an archive for the future, by bringing together artists who create new modes of respect and care for the circulation of narratives and suggest alternative methods of memory-making and keeping. Using various media, from photography and video to collages and cardboard sculptures, each artist presents an intimate, real, fictional, or fantastical narrative garnered through memory, personal and collective experience, historical trauma, archive, or ancestry.
The exhibition's title is taken from a piece in Betty Yu's most recent project, WE WERE HERE: UNMASKING YELLOW PERIL. In this series of collages, Betty uses family-photo archives to narrate the history of systematic discrimination against people of Chinese descent by the structures of white nationalism, referring to her family's story of immigration since the late 1800s. Her artist-driven archive gives a tangible understanding of the past and present of real estate development and gentrification in New York City.
In Gegenwartsbewältigung (Overcoming the Present), Ali Shrago-Spechler uses personal stories to create cardboard and papier-mache objects that are associated with memories, to create a muted, un/familiar space for the audience.
Dena Al Adeeb, in The Taste of Displacement, brings together a group of Iraqis, from various personal and professional backgrounds, over an intimate dinner. She honors individual and private histories by inviting her guests to share what is often unacknowledged in the gaps, absences, and silences of historical records and archives from the Iraqi diaspora.
Tiffany Smith's fantastical self-portraits in For Tropical Girls Who Have Considered Ethnogenesis When the Native Sun is Remote address how photography is implicated in creating and perpetuating the constructs of ethnographic identity and prejudices, while simultaneously allowing her to author her own representations of blended cultural heritage.
In The Dig is Her, She is the Dig, Eleana Antonaki's fictional female character, a block of water in the distant future, addresses politics of representational practices concerning national identity, historical trauma, and displacement.
About the Artists:
Dena Al-Adeeb is an Iraqi born transnational artist, scholar-activist, educator, cultural worker, and a mother. She is a Lecturer Faculty in the Gender and Women Studies Department at San Francisco State University. She is currently working on a book manuscript tentatively titled: The Architecture of War: The Destructions of Iraq and the Rise of Petro-cultural Imaginaries in the Persian Gulf. Her research focuses on global war geographies and oil economies as they manifest through contemporary art, visual and material culture, architecture/the built environment, and collective memory in the Arab/Muslim world.
Eleana Antonaki is a New York-based artist. She holds an MFA from Parsons, The New School and has been a fellow at Ashkal Alwan HWP Program, Beirut, and the Whitney Independent Study Program, New York. She works with a variety of media such as drawing, sculpture, textile, and video. Her research revolves around matters of postcolonial and transnational feminism in relation to domestic cultural practices amongst women in the refugee communities in Greece. She is the recipient of the BP Young Artist Award from the National Portrait Gallery of London and the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant for Painters.
Ali Shrago-Spechler is an interdisciplinary artist and educator whose work examines the malleability of history and imagined community. Her installations and performances explore the violence and ubiquity of Jewish histories while creating a familiar and strange space for her audience. Ali is a Fulbright Scholar (Germany 2020-21) and the recipient of the Naomi Anolic Emerging Artist Award
Tiffany Smith is an interdisciplinary artist from the Caribbean diaspora working between photography, video, installation, and design to define spaces and experiences that oscillate between the roles of visitor vs. native, and parse the definition of home. Using plant matter, design elements, patterning, and costuming as cultural signifiers, Smith creates photographic portraits, site-responsive installations, user-engaged experiences, and assemblages informed by researching histories of representation, experiences of cultural ambiguity, and themes of displacement. Smith’s practice centers on what defines and forms communities of people of color, in particular; how they are identified and represented, and how they persist.
Betty Yu is a multimedia artist, photographer, filmmaker, and activist born and raised in New York City to Chinese immigrant parents. Ms. Yu integrates documentary film, new media platforms, and community-infused approaches into her practice. She is also a co-founder of Chinatown Art Brigade, a cultural collective using art to advance anti-gentrification organizing. Ms. Yu has been awarded artist residencies and fellowships from the Laundromat Project, A Blade of Grass, International Studio & Curatorial Program, Intercultural Leadership Institute, Skidmore's Documentary Storytellers' Institute, KODA Lab, Asian American Arts Alliance, En Foco, China Residencies, Flux Factory, and Santa Fe Art Institute.