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Anida Yoeu Ali’s art mixes humour, public confrontation, and science fiction to explore issues of identity. As a Muslim Khmer woman, Anida is a minority whether she’s in her native Cambodia or in the United States, where her family relocated to escape the regime of Pol Pot. She talks about her work across disciplines, from absurdist poetry to public performances such as the Buddhist Bug, where she meets the public, dressed as a large, orange worm-like creature.
ABDUL-REHMAN MALIK VOICEOVER:
Welcome to This Being Human. I’m your host Abdul Rehman-Malik. On this podcast from the Aga Khan Museum, I talk to extraordinary people from all over the world whose life, ideas and art are shaped by Muslim culture.
NADIR NAHDI:
There's a new generation that has a very unique perspective to how they see themselves as young Muslims in the modern world.
TANYA MUNEERA WILLIAMS:
I am this wide-eyed girl. I'm like, I want it all, I want to experience it all.
GINELLA MASSA:
Everyone has a story. Sometimes you just have to find out what it is.
ABDUL-REHMAN MALIK VOICEOVER:
Like the poem that inspires this podcast, The Guest House, by Sufi poet Jallaludin Rumi, we’re talking to people who seek meaning and joy in work and life…regardless of what the day brings.
In what might be Anida Yoeu Ali’s most well-known work, she dressed up as an orange worm-like creature that looks sort of like a giant, retractable paper lantern – and she went off into the world, interacting with people and provoking responses.
Pictures from the project show her riding in a cart in the Cambodian countryside, visiting temples, climbing a fire escape, and surrounding children in a classroom.
It’s surreal – and it’s funny. But it’s getting at serious issues – feelings of displacement, and the struggle between the influence and tensions of Islam and Buddhism in her life.
ANIDA YOEU ALI:
What is this diasporic dilemma that I am feeling? This feeling of being so caught in the insider-outsider notions. And the idea of being here and there. The idea of what is it going to take to kind of connect these seemingly disparate things that are always at odds with each other.
ABDUL-REHMAN MALIK VOICEOVER:
Anida Yoeu Ali is a Muslim Khmer artist, born in Cambodia. Her parents fled the genocidal regime of Pol Pot when she was a child and raised her in hyper diverse, multicultural Chicago. You don’t hear about Khmer Muslims very much. In fact, being Muslim and Khmer means being a minority wherever you are. Anida’s work has sought to not only connect her with her rich past, but to create connection and community in the present.
As an adult, she returned to Cambodia, where she co-founded Studio Revolt, an artist-run media lab in Phnom Penh.
In addition to her public performances, Anida works in many disciplines – video, photography, installations, poetry…She’s a bit of a Renaissance woman.
I reached her in Tacoma, Washington to talk about cross-cultural creativity, her relationship with Cambodia and of course, about the Buddhist Bug.
ANIDA YOEU ALI:
At the time, in 2009 was when I started to think about this work. And I had just given birth to my first daughter, my first child, and I was, of course, a graduate student being a mother at the same time. And it was a challenge and so we had this one moment of joy with my daughter where we were gifted this tunnel, this play tunnel. It was a collapsible play tunnel, kind of looks like a laundry chute.
ABDUL-REHMAN MALIK:
I love those.
ANIDA YOEU ALI:
And she loved it. Yes. Because, you know, you can spread it out and it sprawls. And then you can collapse it, Velcro it, and tuck it away. And so I loved this thing and my daughter loved it. And then I looked at this thing for a long time. So that's like one moment. Another moment is, as a diasporic individual, you know, I have this back and forth relationship with Cambodia. And when I finally went to Southeast Asia for the first time as an adult, now keep in mind, my family left in such violence circumstances when I was five years old. I have very, very few memories. But when I went back at the age of 30 for the first time in the early 2000s, I was floored with the colours of the country. And the one colour that stood out was the orange. And it was the first time in my life that I was so overwhelmed by this colour, not just for its beauty and the way that it drew me, but it was also that this realization that, oh my god, like my parents left a country that was 98% Buddhism with their Islam, and that was the one thing that they wanted to pass down. I didn't understand how important it was for them to hold on to this religion and pass it because, you know, we did not really go with the Cambodian community that was in Chicago. My parents put us with the Muslim community. And it didn’t hit me until returning to Cambodia for the first time, like oh, my gosh, like. Like I knew we were Cambodian, but I didn't know that we were that kind of Cambodian. Like that we were the ethnic minorities.
And essentially, I've created a creature that embodies the diasporic dilemma by being a creature that can collapse and coil into a ball, similar to my experience as a refugee in coming with nothing but the clothes on our backs. And then sprawl and take up this expanse. That was really important for me, that somehow whatever entity I create and as I was sketching this out and the play tunnel comes into being, I'm like, this is it. This is the form. And I know I'm going to make it orange because I want to like kind of visually represent that overwhelming, what it feels like to have a hijab on while, you know, being surrounded by the orangeness, which is my Muslim-Khmer identity.
ABDUL-REHMAN MALIK:
So as you're taking this incredible kind of outfit, installation work into the public spaces that you end up being photographed in, what kind of reactions are you getting from people when you're walking around and being present in this thing?
ANIDA YOEU ALI:
The reactions that I've received over the years have been enormously awesome, first of all. The majority of reactions have been of wonder and curiosity and joy. There's a constant double take. People will pass the situation, whether it's the live performance or the photographs or videos, they'll pass it and then they'll do the double take. Like, wait a minute. What am I seeing here? Even when I go to sites of engagement and do a more staged video piece, I talk to the locals to make sure it's okay that they feel like they're part of this contemporary art conversation. And then, you know, I come back and I come back with my team because it's, you know, it's 100 meters of fabric and sometimes they only use 40 meters or 25 meters. So they see me sculpting the whole social sculpture. Right? They see me as a main person that's finessing everything, that's sculpting the thing into place. I have inserted the legs. I always put the legs in place first. And it's always somebody who's willing on my team to do it or someone who is just game and excited. And then I sculpt the rest of it, and then I insert myself as the head. And people are watching this, right?
ABDUL-REHMAN MALIK:
So is there a person at the end? The legs. Because it's so true when you see the pictures of it. You see the end of it and you’re like, there's legs there. Are those...
ANIDA YOEU ALI:
Yes. There is no photoshopping. This is a live embodiment entailing two people that is occupying the garment.
ABDUL-REHMAN MALIK:
It's so cool.
ANIDA YOEU ALI:
But here's the thing. Locals will see us sculpting and putting the entities inside the bodies and suddenly, when it's all formed and the camera rolls, it's the same reaction. It's the (gasping sound), the mouth agape, everybody's big eyes. And I'm like, but you just saw us, you know, fake this situation. But I'm telling you, like clockwork. It doesn't matter. There is something breathtaking and moving. And this is what's so beautiful about art is it allows people to have this suspension of disbelief. You know, they suspend their ideas that this is fake because I've just created a world where it is possible for just a moment, you know, what is it that you're seeing, who are you seeing, what are you experiencing and why are you so curious about what you're seeing? And why are you following me and my very gentle little movements? Because all I do is I literally sway. I sway and I'll, you know, do little gestures with my head to bring people in. I'll smile. I'll lick my lips. And I will, you know, just really be present, make eye contact, smirk. I will imitate people. The feet, meanwhile, are, you know, dangling and moving their toes and feeling out the space. And sometimes people will approach and tickle the legs. And then I as the body react as well. So there's, you know, this whole performativity. But, you know, the whole point is to make them curious enough to look up the piece a little bit more and to think through what they're seeing because the entire face is modeled after a hijab and ideas around the modesty of a woman's dress. And then the orange is obviously the orange of the Buddhist robes, and it is putting these two religions together. And it is asking people to think about religious intolerance or religious tolerance and notions of religious hybridity in a different way.
Something I haven't talked about are the bad reactions to the Buddhist Bug.
ABDUL-REHMAN MALIK:
Yeah. Tell me about those Anida.
ANIDA YOEU ALI:
Wow. So the very first solo exhibition was at a gallery space called Java Arts Gallery in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, a very well-known cafe that was showing artwork. And after the opening, a patron who visits that, a Cambodian woman who's kind of upper class, who visits that cafe often, came in and just went to town on the piece. And made a fuss with the staff calling, you know, the owner of the gallery in, saying I want to meet with her. And then the gallery owner came, who's also the owner of the cafe, and talked to the woman. The woman was like, you need to take this down. This is so offensive to Buddhism. This is not our Buddhism. I don't know what this is. If you don't take this down, I'm not going to come back to this restaurant. And so she was like, oh, we're not going to take it down. We don't have a problem with it. We support Anida fully. And so she stood by me. So that was one reaction. The other reaction was the first solo exhibition of course. You know, it's a very new piece, new to people. And so it got a lot of press. And then it went kind of viral online in the Cambodia setting. And there was a group of Muslims who saw the bug and it said that it's both, you know, Buddhist and Muslim. It was the headline for one of the reviews. And the person took the the image and the headline, put a big red X on it and said, this is not our Islam. And so then that circulated and it was in Khmer. So I had to have a person translate it for me because I'm not literate, I can only speak. But there was a big red X on my face, basically. And so I was like, what? What, what is this about? And so they explained it to me, yeah, this person is not… So I was getting this pushback, right from this small minority of supposedly Buddhist folks and supposedly Muslim folks who are pushing back against it, who thought that wasn't representative of their religion. One other moment that was very, really tugged at me was when I performed in front of the Sultan Mosque in Singapore. And that was with a Malay Singaporean curator who had hooked that up, loved my work, very supportive of it, got permission from the Sultan Mosque already to do the live performance of the Bug outside of the mosque. Nobody was going to go inside the mosque. I mean, we all have these respectful ways that we know our religion, right?
ABDUL-REHMAN MALIK:
Absolutely.
ANIDA YOEU ALI:
And again, these were all Muslim curators and organizers, young, who was interested in this conversation. And so during the live embodiment, an older man, an elder, walked across and he said in Malay, this is blasphemous. He was yelling. The curators were just panicking. He was just going off, like he just was yelling. Everybody else, Hijab, no Hijab. Religious, non-religious, Muslim, non-Muslim, all circled and were fine with it, right? But when he said this and I tried to make eye contact with him because he stood right in front of me. And that moment I was getting glassy-eyed because I knew exactly the kind of closed mindedness of elders in that particular context that I have addressed before. You know, it's the same kind of folks who try to tell you you can't marry a certain man, you can't be at your grandmother's funeral at the head of the line because it's reserved for men. Like, these are all things that, you know, I have experienced in my lifetime. And that moment with him looking at me with such disdain and thinking that he was right in saying that I would be whatever he was thinking, probably going to hell or something, for a piece that was about bringing peace and joy and understanding. And so that was a hard moment and, you know, I just was like, okay, well it’s one reaction.
ABDUL-REHMAN MALIK:
You know, you mentioned that you were born in Cambodia during the terrible reign of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge regime. What are some of those memories that you have and that your family has of that time that you feel enduringly shaped the kind of artist and person you are?
ANIDA YOEU ALI:
Yeah. So a lot of my talks, I begin with four photos, which are the closest thing I have to my quote, "baby photos". These photos I put at the beginning of my talk are photographs that were taken of our family when we arrived at the refugee camp in Thailand. The photos were taken by our Thai family, who had gotten word that maybe we survived. There's a photo with a care package with a brown wrapped box. And I was told later that they, the Thai family, brought us these goods to make sure we were going to be fed and clothed. Even the clothes we were wearing, we had changed into because everything was so tattered that they brought us clothes. My hair is pretty red, probably scorched by the sun as we were forced to work in the fields. And I'm about four or five years old in this photo. My brother is, you know, being carried by sometimes my mom or my dad and different folks in there. My grandmother looks shell-shocked. My aunties are there. And it is just haunting, these photos, because it reminds me, I position it in the beginning to remind me of the role of memory and photography. And photography to continue where memory stops. You know, like I believe that part of the reason why I'm so attracted to documenting my performances is a result of me trying to mine for the moments that were taken during these atrocious years of my family's history. Now, what's poetic is that those five years that I was chasing for the memories that were taken from me or the life that I have a very difficult time recalling, I was given that chance for the five years of residency that I took from 2011 to 2015 in Cambodia as a result of my Fulbright work. I got those. So there is something, you know, Alhamdulillah, God sent and poetic about... Wow. Like I lost those years, but I regained it in this whole other way. Like, I raised my young family there. Myself, my husband and my three daughters got five years in the country that is my mom's country and my dad's country, my motherland. And I think, you know, those are the things that really fuel me because all those things that I lost, it just reminds me that your life and what you do in the world matters beyond your trauma. And there's a way that one can push for beauty and joy that doesn't have to be so profoundly about reliving those traumas. And everybody works through it differently. You know, I've had a lifetime's work ranging from writings to stage performance to one-woman show to now this visual realm. And I just feel like with my visual works and my non-English base performance, like non-speaking nonverbal performance, it allows more people to enter into the conversation. It allows more people across the globe, across the world to be part of it. And that is something that I am very interested in as an artist.
ABDUL-REHMAN MALIK:
You know talked about growing up in the United States and being in Chicago and your parents kind of finding a home in in a Muslim community. But as Khmer Cham Muslims, you were not Black, you weren't Arab, you weren't Desi, Pakistani, Indian. That must have been an interesting experience, right? Finding your Muslimness within this this landscape of Islam in the United States, which, of course, is often at odds with itself, often struggles between African-American and Indigenous perspectives, is deeply fragmented by class and power. Then comes this Khmer Muslim family into this very complicated, you know, nexus of Islamic relationships. What does it mean to be Muslim and Khmer in that kind of community environment?
ANIDA YOEU ALI:
It was amazing, to be honest. We were so well-loved and well taken care of. I think about those years a lot because it was so diverse. We all came together. I mean, you're talking about in the 1980s as a third-grade, fourth-grade, fifth-grade child, praying alongside Syrians, Egyptians, Pakistanis, Bangladeshi, and knowing where those countries were, you know. Like that to me was what I loved and must have been the famous Malcolm X scene when he goes to Hajj for the first time and realizes, you know, the diversity of Islam of varying shades. And I really believe that at least growing up in the 1980s and in our local mosque, there was that diversity. And there was that love and generosity. I just loved it and I think about that a lot and I still stay connected to so many of my friends from those years. In fact, with the Red Chadors series and that performance, one of my childhood friends who's a doctor now, Sabreen Akhter, lives in the Seattle area, and I invited her to embody one of the chadors. And so that was deeply moving for us to connect and for her to be in my performance pieces as a non artist. And, you know, for us to recollect those years at the local mosque and for me, the local mosque also gave me the ability to organize. Like I created a youth group of all activists, Muslim women, girls. That was my really my, you know, entry into activism work and we put on fashion shows that were for all girls. We went, you know, to swimming pools and had like an all-girls swimming pool day and bowling. So all these things that I felt like I wasn't socially getting in the other worlds of it being just not sensitive to, you know, me not eating pork and observing Islam in a certain way and taking time out to pray, like those things were appreciated in the mosque community where you didn't have to explain what you were doing and why you suddenly had to ditch out and wear a white garment and face a certain direction and do this like, crazy thing that you know. So, it felt good.
ABDUL-REHMAN MALIK:
Anida, as you're describing this experience of growing up in this community, it now like starts to become even more clear that this thread throughout your work about collaboration. And you mentioned the Red Chador project. In this project you and others dress in this deep red sequined chador, almost, almost this wrap, which comes over the head and around the body and you walk around in public. And in so many ways, it seems to mirror the impact of the Buddhist Bug as this kind of pattern interrupt, right? But you're also the project director of something that I find really intriguing. And I hope you could unpack it a little bit for us of a collaborative multimedia project called, The 1700 Percent Project. Tell us a little bit about this and how this came about.
ANIDA YOEU ALI:
Yeah, so that is the project that was my thesis work. I decided to go back into the narrative form of writing, And so the 1700 Percent Project is rooted in this poem that I made after 9/11. What happened was that I saw in my own community, the heavy surveillance of my community. Aunties were having their hijab pulled, uncles suddenly disappeared momentarily because some van came up and took them away. And then, of course, the rise of the hate against Muslims. But not just Muslims, people who were perceived as Muslims. And I started to pay attention to these hate crime reports. And then there was one little information that came out that said that this rise, this increase within that year was 1,700%. And so I developed a poem that is a compilation of hate crime reports. So I'm appropriating text and it's a cento, which means it's 100 lines of found text, that is crafted in such a way that the text then becomes more absurdist. And it's repeating the lines “mistaken for Muslim.” Because as I dug up these hate crime reports over headlines, that was the common thing that kept coming up. Latinos mistaken for Muslim, two women speaking Spanish, mistaken for Muslim. A woman wearing a Quranic charm, mistaken for Muslim. A Sikh, you know, mistaken for Muslim, whatever it is. And then the poem becomes more absurdist, you know, because there was two women or a woman eating a bagel and then she was attacked, mistaken for Muslim. And then the poem will increase and it'll say a bagel, mistaken for Muslim, mosquitos mistaken for Muslim, but I made it first as a written piece. Then I took it and I made it a performance piece. And then I took the poem and I put it as white vinyl text, really large on a white space. So you couldn't read the text until you smeared this stain that I made. What I did was I had four members of my community, diverse members of my community, Muslim and non-Muslim, memorize the poem, embody the poem for my thesis work and then they delivered it. Every week they were supposed to come deliver the poem. After they've delivered the poem to whoever is there, the audience, they take the stain and they rub it against the wall. And it's only through the smearing and the staining that you start to see the words come. And those words are all 100 lines of this poem that is extracted from the hate crime reports, you know, that are a result of crimes committed against people perceived as Muslims. And that's the project. And then there's a video piece. That's the other iteration. It's very extensive. The video piece is one of my first collaborations with Masahiro Sugano of Studio Revolt. And we called upon my Chicago Muslim community because I said, we need to show people the face of Muslims. The Muslims that I grew up with were diverse. I don't know why people think that Muslims only exist now in Saudi Arabia or something. That's not true. You know, and so I put a community call out and people came and we did these video portraits. And the video won a contest, a Chicago contest. The film was almost disqualified because they didn't think it fit the parameters of their Kumbaya approach to one nation, you know, like Muslims putting on a good face to being like one nation.
ABDUL-REHMAN MALIK:
Anida, you work in so many disciplines with so many different collaborators, in so many different sites - from the United States to Cambodia and places in between and beyond. So I wonder in this moment, as we're coming out of a hot pandemic, into a long pandemic, as we are contending with a lot of social, political, economic and spiritual fracture, as we're facing down the climate catastrophe. And at the same time, we're trying to raise families and parent kids and build communities. I wonder as an artist, what's exciting you right now? Where is your work headed?
ANIDA YOEU ALI:
Oof. I want to learn to be good to myself while being ambitious with my dreams. I haven't figured it out yet because I feel like to live this life you know, as an artist and as someone who tries to provoke, it is hard. It is a difficult hustle. You constantly come up against walls and obstacles and challenges. And then to try to raise your family in all of this. You know, I think that's where it gets me. It's like sometimes you just want to take your family away, especially right now in the U.S. I just… I'm beside myself with all the mass shootings and the level of white supremacy and violence that is so obvious. You know, it's not even hidden anymore. And so I am afraid for my children. I'm afraid for their friends. I'm afraid for my extended family, for the people we call, family of choice. Like I haven't had this fear in this country all these years and and even the other kinds of violences that I've experienced. I just think that they just don't make it easy for any of us to be here, you know, as people of colour, let alone artists of colour. And so, yeah, I have a lot of things to say and I'm not done and I definitely think humour is very important. So one of the things that I am looking forward to doing is the red chador as…do you know the 1950s B-movie called the Attack of the 50 Foot Woman.
ABDUL-REHMAN MALIK:
Yes, yes I do.
ANIDA YOEU ALI:
So imagine, Attack of the 99 Foot Chador. That is something that I'm very interested in creating as a video piece with miniatures where the chador gets to just freaking smash things without realizing how big of a presence she is. It’s like she's just drinking water out of the lake and suddenly, like, it's floods, you know, everywhere.
ABDUL-REHMAN MALIK:
I love it.
ANIDA YOEU ALI:
It's like I just want her to just have this presence. And I think that, you know, it's just important to have that sense of humour when you're making these, you know, pieces for now, you know? And I think that we need to have more people sort of paying attention to the work and coming into the work and then also just… you know, I think about Muslim futures as, you know, a phrase I've been thinking through. But it's also that our futures are linked, are intrinsically and necessarily linked to other futures. It's not an isolated thing. Our communities cannot thrive if we don't see our links to the queer community, Black community, Asian Americans, Latinx, the Indigenous folks, you know, issues of sovereignty, Palestinians. Like I think that's the thinking. We cannot isolate ourselves and we cannot be in our own little bubbles. And we have to really work on the solidarity and all of us do the hard work of putting complicated images out there, even if it's going to be a little bit wrong for, you know, that elder that's pointing his finger at you and schooling you and saying you're blasphemous. Like sometimes we need to figure out what the edge is and the lines are of our community to kind of, you know, push it.
ABDUL-REHMAN MALIK:
Anida, who or what would you like to welcome into your guest house?
ANIDA YOEU ALI:
I would say Prophet Muhammad's wives. I would really like to welcome them from the dead into my house to really have a conversation with them. I think they would solve a lot of questions and things that I have as a feminist, specifically Aisha and Khadija. Like, I really want to sit down with those two women and have a little bit of tea time with them.
ABDUL-REHMAN MALIK:
I'd love to be a fly on the wall for that conversation between you and Khadija and Aisha.
Anida Yoeu Ali, thank you so much for being on This Being Human and for the incredible work that you do and will continue to do. It's inspiring and it's challenging and it feels like everything that art should be.
ANIDA YOEU ALI:
Thank you so much for having me.
ABDUL-REHMAN MALIK VOICEOVER:
Thanks for listening to This Being Human. You can see some of Anida’s work if you look in the show notes.
This Being Human is produced by Antica in partnership with TVO. Our Senior Producer is Kevin Sexton. Our associate producer is Zana Shammi. Additional editorial support from Lisa Gabriele. Mixing and sound design by Phil Wilson. Original music by Boombox Sound. Stuart Coxe is the president of Antica Productions. Katie O’Connor is TVO’s senior producer of podcasts. Laurie Few is the executive for digital at TVO.
This Being Human is generously supported by the Aga Khan Museum, one of the world’s leading institutions that explores the artistic, intellectual and scientific heritage of Muslim civilizations around the world. For more information about the museum go to www.agakhanmuseum.org
The Museum wishes to thank Nadir and Shabin Mohamed for their philanthropic support to develop and produce This Being Human.
Anida Yoeu Ali’s art mixes humour, public confrontation, science fiction to explore issues of identity. As a Muslim Khmer woman, Anida is a minority whether she’s in her native Cambodia or in the United States, where her family relocated to escape the regime of Pol Pot. She talks about her work across disciplines, from absurdist poetry to public performances such as the Buddhist Bug, where she meets the public, dressed as a large, orange worm-like creature.
In this episode, Anida talks about:
Quotes:
“Your life and what you do in the world matters beyond your trauma. And there’s a way that one can push for beauty and joy that doesn’t have to be so profoundly about reliving those traumas.” - Anida Yoeu Ali, 19:24
“I want to learn to be good to myself while being ambitious with my dreams.” - Anida Yoeu Ali, 30:04
“All of us [need to] do the hard work of putting complicated images out there.” - Anida Yoeu Ali, 34:11
To learn more about this conversation, AR recommends:
