May 5, 2024: BORN A PROBLEM Craft Workshop
May 5, 2024 | Sunday | 2:30 - 4:30 PM
at GRAY AREA
2665 Mission St., San Francisco, CA 94110
*** Registration Required ***
Limited to 20 participants only
Exhibition Hours: May 1-5, Wed to Sun 3:00 - 8:00 PM
[ Register: May 5, 2024 Craft Workshop ]
Join us for an “erasing oppression :: re/claiming power, a blackout poetry workshop” led by Jason Wyman of Queerly Complex that will engage participants in erasing oppression and re/claiming power through a series of exercises and examinations rooted in liberating our beings from past and current laws and policies that criminalize along the axes of race, national identity, gender, sexual orientation, poverty, and disability.
Participants are encouraged to bring texts (e.g. State Senate bills, political speeches, immigration policies, ballot propositions, etc.) with them that directly address their own identities and oppression. Facilitators will also provide a selection of texts for reference/inspiration.
Registration required — limited to 20 participants. We will confirm your participation by April 30th, 2024.
ABOUT THE FACILITATOR
JASON MICHAEL WYMAN (E / he / they), also known as Queerly Complex, was born upon the Land of 10,000 Lakes on what E is coming to know as Turtle Island, who has settled on Yelamu, which is also called San Francisco.
Jason's name means healer, or so he's been told since a young child, and they did not believe it until Eir father, Michael (Mike) James Wyman, and him mended their selves and one another as Mike died of mantle cell non-Hodgkin's lymphoma across a screen and a country over all of 2020. What E has come to understand as the significance of his name is that healer does not mean healed or (even) healing. Rather, it is a positionality within the cosmos that allows one's self to change and be changed by all that unfolds. It is to be curious and listen, and then create.
Jason is proud to be a Co-Founder of the Immigrant Artist Network with Rupy C. Tut and a collective of 23 immigrant artists, a Co-Founder of Tree of Change with Crystal Mason, an Arts Consultant with AllThrive Education, and a Creator of Chaos Poetry.
[ queerlycomplex.com ]
Photo credit: Queering Beauty
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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