A screening program of seven time-based works that engage with gender, family structures, and personal oral history across the Asian diaspora. The performative and conversive act, often staged with the artist’s family members or senior communities in the form of interviews or show-and-tells, becomes a platform for negotiating and sharing cross-generational ideas of identity, immigration, and love. Uniting them is a deep interest in deconstructing and recontextualizing everyday rituals, whether eating or long-distance skype calls, as well as an attempt to parse out the fraught spaces that often prevent emotional openness and physical proximity. Here, the absurd and the mundane become interchangeable. More importantly, these efforts thrust the interiority of private spheres into the public realm—a means for regaining a sense of lost intimacy.

This screening was organized as a part of a series of public programming, in conjunction with Looking in the Spotless Rain, curated by Yulia Topchiy.

Featurig short films by Alison Kuo and Riita Ikonen, Joan Oh, Kanthy Peng, Kenneth Tam, Zhiyuan Yang, Maya Yu Zhang.