Anida Yoeu Ali (B.1974)
Anida Yoeu Ali (b.1974, Battambang) is an artist whose works span performance, installation, video, poetry, public encounters, and political agitation. She is a first generation Muslim Khmer woman born in Cambodia and raised in Chicago. After residing for over three decades outside of Cambodia, Ali returned to work in Phnom Penh as part of her 2011 U.S. Fulbright Fellowship researching creation mythologies in contemporary Khmer performance.
Utilizing an interdisciplinary approach to artmaking, her installation and performance works investigate the artistic, spiritual and political collisions of a hybrid transnational identity. From the Faroe Islands to the Bronx, Copenhagen to Ho Chi Minh City, she lectures, exhibits and performs internationally. Her pioneering work with the critically acclaimed group I Was Born With Two Tongues (1998-2003) is archived with the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Program and the Hemispheric Institute Digital Video Library. Her latest work The Red Chador (2015-2017) unapologetically stares into the face of Islamophobia whether it’s on the streets of Paris after the Charlie Hebdo killings or on the collegiate U.S. playgrounds of wealthy Trump voters. Unfortunately in 2017, the original garment of The Red Chador (last performed at the Kuala Lumpur Biennale) was confiscated by Israeli airline officials, marking the death of the performance project. No stranger to controversy, Ali’s artworks have agitated the White House (My Asian Americana, 2011 & Return to Sender, 2012), been attacked by anonymous vandals (1700% Project, 2010), and censored by Vietnam’s “culture” police (Pushing Thru Borders, 2003).
Ali has performed and exhibited at the Palais de Tokyo, Musée d’art Contemporain Lyon, Malay Heritage Centre, Fukuoka Asian Art Museum and Queensland Art Gallery. Her artistic work has been the recipient of grants from the Rockefeller Foundation, Ford Foundation, the National Endowment of the Arts and the Art Matters Foundation. Ali earned her B.F.A. from University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign) and an M.F.A. in performance from School of the Art Institute Chicago.
She is a collaborative partner with Studio Revolt, an independent artist run media lab launched in Phnom Penh, Cambodia in 2011. Through Studio Revolt, Ali engages in international dialogues, community activism, and artistic resistance to multiple sites of oppression. In 2014, the studio released their award-winning feature documentary Cambodian Son about a deportee who transforms his life through poetry.
Ali was awarded the 2014-2015 Sovereign Asian Art Prize for The Buddhist Bug series, a multidisciplinary work that investigates displacement and identity through humor, absurdity and performance. Ali’s work provocatively considers the diasporic past and present contours of hybrid identities. Since 2009, Ali has embarked on The Buddhist Bug project, which explores the intersection between identity and location where the ‘bug’ appears perpetually surreal. The Bug’s displacement amidst mundane Cambodian settings represents the struggle to belong and the journey towards finding home. Ali plays with the interests in hybridity, transcendence and otherness, relatable to many transnational identities. This project alone, has been exhibited in Phnom Penh galleries (2011, 2012, 2013), Singapore International Photography Festival (2012), Malaysia Heritage Centre Singapore (2015), Southeast Asia ArtsFest London (2014), featured at the 5th Fukuoka Asian Art Triennale, (2014) and Wei Ling Contemporary, Kuala Lumpur (2019).