May 5, 2024: BORN A PROBLEM Closing Celebration
May 5, 2024 | Sunday | 5:00 - 7:00 PM
at GRAY AREA
2665 Mission St., San Francisco, CA 94110
*** Open to Public ***
Sliding scale admission | $15 suggested donation
Exhibition Hours: May 1-5, Wed to Sun 3:00 - 8:00 PM
[ RSVP has closed ]
Come join the Closing Celebration of BORN A PROBLEM: A Multimedia Exhibition with a special musical performance by Gamelan Sekar Jaya and readings by a line-up of all-Indonesian diaspora writers:
Cynthia Dewi Oka
Edward Gunawan
Giovanna Lomanto
Jeddie Sophronius
May-Li Khoe
ABOUT FEATURED PERFORMER & READERS
Gamelan Sekar Jaya's 2023-2024 Guest Music Director NI NYOMAN SRAYAMURTIKANTI is the daughter of I Nyoman Suryadi, a natural artist, composer, and singer from Celuk Village in Sukawati, Gianyar, Bali.
Srayamurtikanti has studied Balinese gamelan since elementary school from various master teachers, including her father, I Ketut Cater, I Made Subandi, and others. Her education has focused on the arts from her studies at SMKN 3 Sukawati, an arts specialty high school, and Denpasar’s Institute for Indonesian Arts (Institut Seni Indonesia or ISI Denpasar). Srayamurtikanti finished her master’s degree in music composition at the Surakarta branch of the Institute for Indonesian Arts in 2022.
Srayamurtikanti is also the head of Sanggar S’mara Murti, originally founded by her father. Srayamurtikanti began composing in 2017, and her works are based on the intersection of tradition and innovation in Balinese arts. Srayamurtikanti has represented Indonesia at events across Southeast Asia, and her music has been featured in regional, national, and international events. In 2020, she was a featured guest in Gamelan Sekar Jaya’s Bali’s Living Arts speaker series.
[ gsj.org ]
Originally from Bali, Indonesia, CYNTHIA DEWI OKA (she/her) is the author of four books of poems, most recently A Tinderbox in Three Acts, a Blessing the Boats Selection chosen by Aracelis Girmay (BOA Editions, 2022) and Fire Is Not a Country (Northwestern University Press, 2021).
A recipient of the Amy Clampitt Residency, Tupelo Quarterly Poetry Prize, and the Leeway Transformation Award, her writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Oprah Daily, POETRY, Academy of American Poets, Poetry Society of America, Hyperallergic, and elsewhere.
An alumnus of the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers, she has taught creative writing at Bryn Mawr College, New Mexico State University, Blue Stoop, Voices of Our Nations (VONA), Anaphora Literary Arts, and The Writers' Program at UCLA Extension.
For fifteen years, Cynthia served social movements for racial, gender, climate, and migrant justice as an organizer, trainer, and fundraiser. Based in Los Angeles, she currently works as a strategic consultant and serves as Editor-in-Chief of Adi Magazine.
[ cynthiadewioka.com ]
Photo credit: Bill Prokopow
EDWARD GUNAWAN (he/they) is a Bay Area-based writer, translator, and curator whose multimedia projects and community work meditates upon themes of displacement and (be)longing, healing and intimacy, kinship and citizenship within the contexts of post-colonial queer transnationality.
They authored chapbooks: Start a Riot! Prize-winning The Way Back (Foglifter Press, 2022) and Press Play (Sweet Lit, 2020), and their poems/cine-poems, short stories, essays/video-essays, and translations have been published in TriQuarterly, Aquifer, The Town anthology (Nomadic Press, 2023), and elsewhere.
As writer, producer, actor, and/or director, they have completed over 25 feature and short films. Their last two producing projects—How to Win at Checkers (Every Time) and By the Time It Gets Dark—premiered in Berlin and Locarno respectively, and were both honored as Thailand's Best Foreign Language Film entries for the Academy Awards.
An Indonesian-born Chinese queer immigrant, Edward serves as the founder and lead organizer of HOME MADE @ ARTogether that hosts free literary arts gatherings in Oakland, CA.
[ addword.com ]
Photo credit: Sarah Deragon
GIOVANNA LOMANTO (she/her) is a Pushcart Prize-nominated poet and photographer who has published 2 poetry collections, 2 chapbooks, and a limited edition art book.
Her next collection, driver’s seat echo, is available for preorder and is set to release in April. A recent graduate of the MFA program at New York University, her work has been supported by the SFMOMA, LitQuake, the Ecology Center of Berkeley, and various reading series around the Bay Area.
JEDDIE SOPHRONIUS (he/they) is the author of the poetry collections Interrogation Records (Gaudy Boy, 2024), Happy Poems & Other Lies (Codhill Press, 2024), Love & Sambal (The Word Works, 2024), and the chapbook Blood·Letting (Quarterly West, 2023), a runner-up for Quarterly West’s 2022 Chapbook Contest.
A Chinese-Indonesian writer, educator, and translator originally from Jakarta, he received his MFA from the University of Virginia, where he served as the editor of Meridian. Their poems have appeared in The Cincinnati Review, The Iowa Review, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere, while their prose is forthcoming in The Arkansas International, MAYDAY Magazine, and The Third Coast. They divide their time between Indonesia and the United States.
[ nakedcentaur.com ]
Photo credit: Jingrun Lin
MAY-LI KHOE (she/her) is an artist, designer, and writer, born in the Netherlands to Chinese-Indonesian immigrant parents and raised in Vancouver, Canada. May-Li is currently earning her MFA in Creative Writing at San Francisco State University, where she plays in the blur between genres and formats, across time and space, generations and geographies, worlds and afterlives. Her work unravels the profound hidden in the mundane, casts light on the imperialism in our spice cabinets, and unearths humor in the tragic fallibility of human belief systems.
In her past, she’s served, among other things, as a VP of Design, a co-founder of companies, a DJ, and a co-creator of a music and dance toy called Boogie Loops for the Playdate game platform. She’s helped invent new ways for people and computers to interact, such as the now-ubiquitous face filters and haptic feedback. Her music is in the soundtrack of award-winning documentary, Powerlands. Her writing and art has been published in The Ana, Transfer Magazine, Umber Magazine, 14 Hills, the inaugural issue of The HTML Review; and recommended by The New Yorker Recommends weekly newsletter.
When May-Li’s not writing, you might find her halfway up a pole, performing in the Mission District of San Francisco with her band Neblinas del Pacífico, or designing something new.
[ maylikhoe.com ]
Photo credit: Mcklin Photography
ABOUT THE EXHIBITION
APICC, Gray Area & HOME MADE @ ARTogether
with Asian American Women Artists Associations , Clarion Alley Mural Project, Eastwind Books, Queerly Complex, San Francisco State University - Department of Creative Writing, and California Arts Council - Creative Corps Initiative Grant
presents
BORN A PROBLEM: A Multimedia Exhibition
by Paula Te and Edward Gunawan
Apr 28 - May 5 at GRAY AREA
(San Francisco, CA)
In 1965, a CIA-aided military coup marked the beginning of a tumultuous period in Indonesia. The new authoritarian government, perceiving a "Chinese Problem," initiated a series of anti-Chinese policies from 1967-2000: Chinese language names barred on official documents, Chinese language media and schools shuttered, while public celebrations of cultural festivals such as Chinese New Year were banned.
These exclusionist and forced assimilation laws, echoing the Indian Treaties & the Removal Act, the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, and the Immigration Act of 1924 in the United States, fostered resentment and discrimination that led to massacres and sexual violence against the Indonesian Chinese community in 1965 and 1998.
This multimedia exhibition by artist Paula Te and writer Edward Gunawan (who are both of Chinese Indonesian descent) takes the form of erasure poems based on actual laws from this dark chapter of history. The large-scale interactive installation contains the context behind the redacted text, revealed through augmented reality (AR) to investigate the invisible historical forces that impact present-day culture, society, politics–and ultimately, our sense of personal flourishing and communal belonging.
Join our other gatherings during the week-long exhibition:
Check out our other gatherings:
with facilitator Anand Vedawala