“Ms. Guo describes it as a statement show. […] a second installment of The Hearing Trumpet, with work by the video artist Astria Suparak, the ceramicist Heidi Lau and others, opened Saturday.”
Tag: Exhibitions
ALOHA, BOYS
An installation that collages white men outfitted in “Hawaiian shirts” while vacationing in future foreign lands.
*NEWS*
Upcoming and recent exhibitions, screenings, presentations, projects.
South China Morning Post on For Ornamental Purposes
“Astria Suparak’s For Ornamental Purposes (2022), a three-channel video, used scenes from films that cast Asian women only to be desired and conquered, pointing to the harm made possible by fantasy. […] ‘With Her Voice, Penetrate Earth’s Floor’ carves quiet moments like these to express how it feels to be broken.
Ocula on For Ornamental Purposes
“Suparak’s three-channel video For Ornamental Purposes (2022) zooms in on the holographic koi fish sometimes used in Western sci-fi to signify a more global future.”
FOR ORNAMENTAL PURPOSES
A 3-channel video that “explore[s] Asian subjectivities and objecthood… For Ornamental Purposes treats the motif of a koi fish in three iterations, pulling from techno-Orientalist clichés in sci-fi film.”
Walker Art Center: Peggy Ahwesh & Astria Suparak
“Peggy Ahwesh and Astria Suparak offer inventive perspectives of Western influences on Asian cinema and and Asian influences on Western cinema.” Two-week run at The Walker.
The Hollywood Reporter on Asian Futures, Without Asians
“Asian Futures, Without Asians illuminates the lopsided nature of one Hollywood genre and critiques the way media is concepted to guide audience empathy. Suparak’s [installation] investigates how artificial intelligence is coded in film, and the ways in which sympathetic robots and cyborgs, who are often white, are designed”
SYMPATHETIC WHITE ROBOTS
An installation that “compiles stills from films that marshal empathy for AI agents who are coded as white and humanized through their association with whiteness […] Suparak’s media archaeology interrogates imaginaries of AI”
TROPICOLLAGE
Short looping video that collages footage from 30 years of futuristic sci-fi movies and television shows that employ a fetishized tropics trope.
ASIAN FUTURES, WITHOUT ASIANS (presentation)
Part critical analysis, part reflective essay and sprinkled throughout with humor, justified anger, and informative morsels, this illustrated presentation examines over 50 years of American science fiction cinema through the lens of Asian appropriation and whitewashing.
ASIANS HAVE BEEN HERE LONGER THAN COWBOYS
Billboard created for For Freedoms by Stop DiscriminAsian, on view in Los Angeles.
KQED review of Virtually Asian
“Suparak’s piece is immediate and her voice, narrating the words, is melodic and compelling. The over-dubbing of her acerbic observations on blockbuster films is a compelling prelude to other iterations of her work that will appear in fragments across digital platforms.”
VIRTUALLY ASIAN
Short video essay that looks at how white science fiction filmmakers fill the backgrounds of their futuristic worlds with hollow Asian figures—in the form of video and holographic advertisements—while the main cast (if not the entirety of their fictional universe’s population) is devoid of actual Asian people.
BECOME THE MONUMENTS THAT CANNOT FALL
A newly commissioned public art project and the first survey exhibition of art collective Related Tactics.
ASIAN FUTURES, WITHOUT ASIANS series
Series of projects, presentations, and texts on how white filmmakers envision futures inflected by Asian culture, but devoid of actual Asian people. A visual analysis of 50+ years of American science fiction cinema.
ETERNAL RETURNS
This exhibition is about living with history in the here and now and the distillations we carry into the future. These artists are meticulous researchers, utilizing chemistry, botany, math, religion, politics, and bureaucracy. They explore possibilities, capture turmoil and fallow periods, track displacement and migrations.
A Subjective, Contextual History of Washington, D.C. Pro Basketball
A history of the team and how it intertwines with civic issues, particularly: gun laws and violence, business and labor, real estate and gentrification, race, and class.
POWER FORWARD
The artists in this exhibition draw upon the hidden and political histories of sports to open up analyses of the social world.
A NON-ZERO-SUM GAME
This year-long series of art exhibitions, film programs, discussions, commissioned projects, and other events took place in galleries, cinemas, sports bars, bookstores, and on rooftops from Los Angeles to Washington, D.C.
Astria Suparak 