May 1, 2024: BORN A PROBLEM Artist Talk
May 1, 2024 | Wednesday | 5:30 - 7:30 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: May 1, 2024 Artist Talk ]
Join us for an evening with the lead artists behind the hybrid installation of BORN A PROBLEM: A Multimedia Exhibition to learn more of the inspiration, creative process, and the intended impact of the project:
Paula Te, Exhibition Artist
Edward Gunawan, Exhibition Writer
Colin Sullivan, Exhibition Soundscape Artist
ABOUT THE EXHIBITION ARTISTS
PAULA TE designs and builds interfaces at the intersection of learning, crafting, and culture. She specializes in hybrid digital-physical artifacts and environments that explore alternative visions of the future. Her practice centers community and people from diverse backgrounds, welcoming folks to co-create and contribute their vision of the future, allowing for multiplicities of experiences to unfold.
Paula built a platform named Collaboratura as an Instigator Fellow for the San Francisco Opera (2022-2023) to explore tools for creative collaboration across disciplines in the creative arts. She was previously a design researcher at Dynamicland (2015-2019), investigating a new computational medium woven into physical space. Her work on digital fabrication and interfaces has been featured in Ars Electronica, SIGCHI Interaction Design & Children and Eyeo Festival.
A believer of bridging cross-cultural connection through sustainable community craft, she was a Dinacon Node Leader in Sri Lanka (2022) and facilitated the creation of a recycling machine that turns plastic waste into raw material for new products (2022). Her mini-zine on decolonization has been published in the Interwoven: Black/Asian Solidarities Zine (2022).
Born to Indonesian-Chinese immigrants in the US, Paula currently resides in Duwamish, Seattle, Washington state.
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
COLIN SULLIVAN (he/him) is an Oakland based software developer & artist specializing in interactive musical systems, web technologies, and generative music. Colin has built interactive installations and performed improvisational electronic music using bespoke generative music software.
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.
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