Artist: Ayoung Justine Yu

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The Immigrant Artist Biennial – In Dialogue

Moving Image: Nicholas Oh & Ayoung Justine Yu, Alexander Si, and Masha Vlasova

Surrealists invigorated the film genre in the 1920s and 30s, especially the Spaniards Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí—who at the time were living in Paris—with their non-linear narrative film Un Chien Andalou (1929). Surrealist elements reign in The Immigrant Artist Biennial 2023: Contact Zone’s exhibition Excavated Selves, Magic Bodies at Alchemy Gallery—where surreal elements allow bodies to thrive, often in hostility. A garment used in the video work Mourning Ritual created by artist duo AYDO (Nicholas Oh & Ayoung Justine Yu) on the border between North and South Korea is included in the show. It uses spirituality, ancestry, and surreal landscape to engage with the separation of families and loss of connection. In Parasites and Vessels at Accent Sisters, Alexander Si employs video matter of fact to document his process of crafting a Birkin bag. Masha Vlasova’s poetic work Waterlands investigates surface and texture in the landscape in Enmeshed, Dreams of Water at NARS Foundation.

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The Immigrant Artist Biennial Names 48 Artists and Art Spiel as Media Partner for their 2nd Edition

The second edition of The Immigrant Artist Biennial, titled “Contact Zone”, will showcase the work of 48 artists at seven locations across New York and New Jersey from September to December 2023. The curatorial trio adopted the biennial’s theme from a term coined in 1991 by linguist and critical theorist Mary Louise Pratt, which she used to describe “social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations.” Katherine Adams, co-curator and an affiliate of EMPAC, explains in a statement how this concept guided their curatorial research: “It allowed us to work with a productively fractured relationship to place. It also encapsulates our attempt to find an organizational concept for artistic infrastructures that are diasporic in form and not only content—that can deal with effects of situations such as exile, alienation, or simply the elusive concept of home.”