Zeynep Abes, Memory Place, 2020. Courtesy the artist.
A Fossil, A Ruin, A Memory
Curated by Carrie Chen
LACE 2024 Emerging Curator
Download the Digital Program
Saturday and Sunday, March 16–17, 2024, 2–5 PM
Philosophical Research Society
3910 Los Feliz Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90027
Limited free parking available on site
Free admission
A Fossil, A Ruin, A Memory features contemporary emerging artists from a diverse range of disciplines, including experimental film-making, 3D animation, games and performance. These artists consider the language of memory, navigate transnational spaces, confront displacement and yearning, and excavate personal and collective memories. Piecing together resurfaced myths, fossils, remnants and ruins, they interface between the past and present, to encode and construct an embodied, fragmented presence. Their works resonate with Laura Marks’ concept of Intercultural Cinema, capturing lost histories amid displacement to create new knowledge from the experience of existing between cultures.
The two-day screening program is designed to shed light on the artists’ creative processes and encourage meaningful dialogue and communal exploration around the themes of memory and excavation in our digital era. The essence of these moving images, and the evolving culture they belong to, remains an ongoing exploration in art history, film and theory.
Featuring films by Zeynep Abes, Coffee Kang, somuhwa, Heesoo Kwon 권희수 , April Lin 林, Jas Lin 林思穎, Yuchi Ma 马语迟, Iman Person, Tiare Ribeaux, Ainslee Alem Robson, Qigemu 七个木, Yaloo, Qianqian Ye, and Evelyn Hang Yin.
Video Stills (left): Heesoo Kwon, Leymusoom Garden, 2023, April Lin 林森, now i close my eyes the world i see is so beautiful, 2020, Iman Person, New Air, 2021, Qigemu 七个木, Reality Fragment 160921, 2017, jas lin 林思穎, Schindler House Haunting, 2022, Yaloo, Birthday Garden, 2022, Yuchi Ma, Red Threads (我很爱你), 2022, Zeynep Abes, Memory Place, 2020, Ina Chen, Calvin Sin, Lu Te-Sing, 4993 Feet Under (Performance), 2023.
Program Schedule
Day 1 | Saturday, March 16, 2-5 PM
Screening
Films by Qianqian Ye and Tiare Ribeaux, Iman Person, Heesoo Kwon 권희수, somuhwa, Yaloo, and jas lin 林思穎.
Performance
“4993 Feet Under” by Ina Chen, Calvin Sin, and Te-Hsing Lu
Panel: Ancestral Myths, Geographies and Digital Rebirth
Artists Heesoo Kwon 권희수 and Qianqian Ye, along with Karen Cheung (Curatorial Associate at SFMOMA) and curator Carrie Chen explore the intersection of mythologies, geographies and digital forms of excavation and worship. Through experimental 3D animation and digital storytelling, the panelists discuss how they interface between past and present, traverse physical and digital borders, and share insight into their creative process. The discussion spotlights their creative processes and concludes with a Q&A session with the audience.
Day 2 | Sunday, March 17, 2-5 PM
Screening
Films by Zeynep Abes, Qigemu 七个木, Yuchi Ma 马语迟, April Lin 林森, Coffee Kang and Evelyn Hang Yin, and Ainslee Alem Robson.
Panel: Encoding Memories of Home
Artists Yuchi Ma 马语迟, Coffee Kang, and Evelyn Hang Yin, Ainslee Alem Robson, and curator Carrie Chen explore the echoes of intergenerational memory, capturing and encoding memories amidst borders, and diasporic experiences of home. Artists discuss how they utilize digital mediums—experimental video, 3D animation, and games—to unearth and piece together the fragments of personal and collective histories in transnational spaces. Join us for a deep dive into the artists’ processes, followed by a Q&A session with the audience.
About the Curator
Carrie Chen is an artist and educator based in Los Angeles. Working with CG animation and installation, her moving images explore the nexus of time, memory and identity in the age of simulation and automation. From monumental projection to intimate self-portraits, Chen’s work probes themes of aging, power, and the uncertainties of truth within the realm of representation.
Chen’s expanded practice, including curation, design, and lecturing, engage with non-western ontologies, intercultural experiences and experimentation with hybridity. She is the 2024 Emerging Curator at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE) and is the recipient of the 2024 STRP Award for Creative Technology. She teaches Advanced Visual Design at USC Media Arts + Practice and 3D Arts at Parsons School of Design. Carrie holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Applied Psychology and Art History from New York University, and an MFA in Design Media Art from the University of California, Los Angeles.
About the Artists and Panelists
Zeynep Abes is an artist, curator and educator from Istanbul, Turkey. She studied film and interactive media at Emerson College, later getting her start at LACMA’s Art+Tech lab creating AR installations. She then worked at the Sundance Film Festival’s New Frontier Exhibitions and is a recent graduate of UCLA’s Design Media Arts MFA program. She is currently a Ph.D. candidate in the Media Arts and Practice program at USC’s School of Cinematic Arts. She primarily works with archived photography, video, photogrammetry and immersive media. Her subjects revolve around identity, history, and loss of memory. She is in pursuit of exploring the role artists play in preserving memories to navigate the struggle and alienation that arise from changing social environments and shifting identities.
Ainslee Alem Robson is an Ethiopian-American director, writer, and media artist who crafts emancipatory narratives and counterimaginings combining film, archival materials, installation, and game engine technologies, speaking to the liminal spaces between Africa and its diasporas. Robson’s works present temporal manipulations from positions of decoloniality that actively refuse linear definition. She is a former Sundance ‘Art of Practice’ Fellow and Sundance Humanities Sustainability Fellow. Her directorial debut, Ferenj: A Graphic Memoir in VR, premiered at Tribeca, SXSW, and received the Special Jury Prize at NewImages. Her commissions and collaborations have been exhibited by MU, Ars Electronica, ZHdK, Forum des Images, and MoMA New York respectively. Robson’s new work, Ferenj (the film) was installed in the “Guests From the Future” category of the Curator’s Special Projects in 2023 at La Biennale di Venezia curated by Lesley Lokko.
Karen Cheung is a curator and researcher based in Oakland, California. Her current research explores the ephemerality and affect of performance art in the context of audience participation. Her writings have appeared in Art Practical, Open Space and March Journal of Art and Strategy, Voices in Contemporary Journal. She has held various positions at KADIST, the Vancouver Art Gallery, De Young Museum, and Asian Art Museum of San Francisco. She is currently Curatorial Associate of Media Arts at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
Evelyn Hang Yin is an interdisciplinary artist, filmmaker, and educator based in Los Angeles. Working with photography, video, text, and installation, Yin investigates how her personal experience moving between China and the U.S. informs her cultural identity. Her work is invested in issues of race, gender, history, (dis)placement, and collective memory. She has exhibited at the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, the New Wight Gallery, and the MAK Center for Art and Architecture. She was an Armed with a Camera Fellow with Visual Communications, the Media and Production Fellow for Arts in a Changing America, and the Research and Archive Fellow for China Alley Preservation Society. She is a recipient of the Allan Sekula Social Documentary Fund. Her work has been featured in aint-bad, Booooooom, SupChina, Sohu News, among others. She has taught at Las Fotos Project, artworxLA, California State Summer School for the Arts, and California Institute of the Arts. She received a BA in Political Science and Media Studies from University of California, Berkeley and an MFA in Photography and Media from California Institute of the Arts.
Coffee Kang is a conceptual visual artist based in Los Angeles, primarily working with photo, video, installation, and performance. Coming from a photographer’s background, she embodies ephemera in her works with a strong interest in site-responsive art and alternative gallery spaces, actively exploring the theme of temporality. As a queer, a visa holder, an artist of color, and a metaphorically unhomed body caught in a liminal space at the intersection of identities, Kang reflects a sense of loss and longing by making attempts to see and seek in her works, incorporates aesthetics of melancholy and absurdity, and invites the audience to engage with the narratives of impermanence. Kang holds a BA in Creative Media from City University of Hong Kong (2016), and an MFA in Photo and Media from California Institute of the Arts (2018). Her works have been showcased at The Box, Last Projects, MAK Center, Launch LA, A Room to Create, and LA Artcore. Kang was an artist in residence at Pilotenkueche and Eastside International in 2019, and Level Ground in 2021.
Heesoo Kwon (b. 1990, Seoul, South Korea) is a multidisciplinary artist based in San Francisco. Positioning herself as an artist, activist, archivist, anthropologist, and religious figure, Kwon builds feminist utopias in the digital realm that liberate one from personal, familial, and historical trauma rooted in patriarchy. Central to her practice and substantial bodies of work is Leymusoom, an autobiographical feminist religion she initiated in 2017 as a form of personal resistance against misogyny and an ever-evolving framework for investigating her family histories. Kwon utilizes technologies such as digital archiving, 3D scanning, and animation as her ritualistic and shamanistic tools to regenerate her woman ancestors’ lives without constraints of time and space, and to queer her past, present, and utopian dreams.
April Lin 林森 (b. 1996, Stockholm — they/them) is an interdisciplinary artist and independent curator investigating image-making and world-building as sites for the construction, sustenance, and dissemination of co-existent yet conflicting truths. They interweave moving image, performance, creative computing and installation in a commitment to centring oppressed knowledges, building an ethics of collaboration around reciprocal care, and exploring the linkages between history, memory, and interpersonal and structural trauma. Their work has been shown at the Museum of the Moving Image New York, Sheffield DocFest, LA Filmforum, and NOWNESS Asia.
jas lin 林思穎 (they/them) is a performance artist, choreographer, and movement facilitator born and based in Los Angeles on unceded Gabrieliño-Tongva land. lin stages exorcisms and tantrums for purging choreographies of the learned body and shutting down internal and external surveillance cameras that suggest there is a Proper way to move through the world. their practice of deep feeling is invested in re-membering what the body has been manipulated into forgetting. they value performance as a ritual of deep presence– by returning to our senses, we can reawaken to our possibility, connection, and agency within the world around us. lin’s practice emerges from a vast lineage of teachers, from friendships to films to flowers. centering play in the everyday, they experiment with multiplicity and contradiction while dancing with the world as their body. jas worships the elsewhere and the otherwise, and loves to co-create shared fugitive worlds and live in them. their choreographies, films, workshops, and lectures have been shared around the world, including at MAK Center for Art & Architecture, Danshallerne Copenhagen, MOCA Los Angeles, Power Station of Art Shanghai, V&A Museum, Kassel Dokfest, OIL Shenzhen, and Mitski’s Laurel Hell Tour. jas is committed to the life-long processes of un-learning and un-teaching hierarchical, Othering, and superficial ways of moving, being, sensing, and knowing. they believe movement to be a manifestation and actualization of potentiality– that together, we can dance the possible into being.
Yuchi Ma 马语迟 is an artist, filmmaker, and Parachute Kid from Beijing, China. After getting her BFA studying Film and TV Production at USC in 2019, Yuchi earned her MFA degree in Design Media Arts at UCLA in 2022. In the past, Yuchi has exhibited with various galleries and screening spaces across the US, including LA Artcore, FOCA, and more. Most recently, Yuchi’s short film RED THREADS won the Grand Jury Prize in Experimental Shorts at the 2023 Slamdance Film Festival.
Iman Person is a first-generation Jamaican-American artist and cultural anthropologist whose research explores the intersections of Black and Indigenous technologies, and their connections to ritual, the land, language, and cosmic time. Using Africana cosmologies and personal experience, Iman channels speculative visions of Black futurity through intuitivewriting, video, real-time data, experimental sound, and object-making to shape unexplored ideas concerning living archives and sovereignty.
Qigemu 七个木 is a duo consisting of coordinates April Lin 林森 and jas lin 林思穎exploring the interstices of movement, visual media, identity, and the global Asian diaspora as respectively, Chinese-Swedish and Taiwanese-American. Using the potential of this hybrid space, Qigemu engages in conversations dealing with bodies, information, and energies, and how these are conceptualized in the Internet Age.
Tiare Ribeaux is a Kānaka ‘Ōiwi filmmaker and creative producer based in Honolulu, Hawai‘i. Her films disrupt conventional storytelling methods by employing magical realist explorations of spirituality, labor, and the environment to critique both social and ecological imbalances. Her films use components of speculative fiction and fantasy to reimagine both our present realities and future trajectories of healing, queerness, lineage, and belonging. Ribeaux’s work traverses between the mundane and dreamworlds – creating stories around transformation and how our bodies are inextricably linked to land and water systems. She integrates immersion within community, personal/ancestral narratives, and Hawaiian cosmology into her films. Born and raised on O’ahu, and having lived for many years in the Bay Area before moving back home to the islands, she is interested in telling stories that include contemporary way-finding and resilience within the Kānaka diaspora. Her work often combines with installation elements to create immersive and expanded media experiences. Outside of film festivals, she has shown her work at galleries and museums – in single-channel formats, multi-channel, live cinematic performances, and augmented reality. She has shown work both nationally and internationally, and has won numerous grants and awards for her artistic leadership including the NDN Radical Imagination Grant, the Native Lab Fellowship and Indigenous Film Fund from Sundance, two New and Experimental Works Grants from the Kenneth Rainin Foundation, the Building Demand for the Arts Grant from the Doris Duke Foundation, the Citizen Diplomacy Action Fund from the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, the Zellerbach Family Foundation, and the Center for Cultural Innovation, among others. She has given guest lectures at conferences and universities including ISEA, Stanford, UC Berkeley, SFAI, SJSU, and the school of ATEC at UC Dallas.
somuhwa (Andrea Kim) is an experimental media artist and PhD candidate currently researching and writing in the greater Los Angeles area. She is a writer, director, and PhD Candidate in Media Arts + Practice. Trained in documentary filmmaking, feminist philosophy, and cultural theory, Kim follows traditions of experimentation with emerging technologies using critical and performative methods. They have written on virtual embodiment, medical objectivity, and XR arts praxis, with current interests in the materialist history of computer graphics and contemporary virtual production (XR/GenAI) at the School for Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California (USC). In their arts-research practice, Kim writes via the pseudonym, somuhwa, as an exploration of virtual identity, generative folklore, and transmedia worldmaking. Kim is an alumni of the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program, MIT Open Documentary Lab and Co-Creation Studio, Duke Center for Documentary Studies, and Duke Literature Program, has served on selection committees for the Fulbright Association (Visiting Scholars Program) and Peabody Awards (Interactive Media Section). They have also worked previously with CultureHub Los Angeles, MIT Transmedia Storytelling Initiative, LaMama Experimental Theater, U.S. Embassy in Rabat, and the Seoul Institute of the Arts.
Yaloo earned BFA and MFA in video art from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She has been selected for fully funded international residencies such as Zer01ne and Asia Culture Center in Korea, the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum in Japan, Western Front and La Bande Video in Canada, the Headlands Art Center and Bemis Studio Art Center in USA. She was also awarded a Lyn Blumenthal Memorial Scholarship by Video Data Bank and won a Gold Prize in visual arts from the AHL Foundation in New York. Last year, she was part of a duo show at FACT Liverpool, UK. She is currently a full-time faculty at the Experimental Animation department at CalArts.
Qianqian (Q) Ye (she/they) is a Chinese artist, creative technologist and educator based in Los Angeles (Gabrielino-Tongva Land). Trained as an architect, she creates digital, physical, and social spaces exploring issues around gender, immigrant, power, and technology. Their most recent collaborative project, The Future of Memory, was a recipient of the Mozilla Creative Media Award. At the Processing Foundation, Qianqian is the Lead of p5.js, an open-source art and education platform that prioritizes access and diversity in learning to code, with over 1.5 million users. She currently teaches creative coding as an Adjunct Assistant Professor at USC Media Arts + Practice and 3D Arts at Parsons School of Design. For 2022-2023, Qianqian is a Civic Media Fellow at USC Annenberg Innovation Lab.
ABOUT THE EMERGING CURATOR PROGRAM
A Fossil, A Ruin, A Memory is the ninth presentation from the LACE Emerging Curator Program. Designed to discover curatorial talent in Los Angeles, each year’s selected Curator/Curatorial Team works with the LACE staff over a year to plan and collaborate on the presentation and public programming.
SUPPORT
A Fossil, A Ruin, A Memory is supported by the Los Angeles County Department of Arts and Culture and Pasadena Art Alliance. Special thanks to our friends at the Philosophical Research Society for their support while LACE’s Hollywood gallery is under renovation.