Corner of my room

Format: Participatory performance
Venue: West Village, NY
Year: 2018
Related work: Corner of My Room, 3D installation

A limited number of visitors were invited to the corner of Corner of My Room for an individual viewing. With the installation's static light switched off, each participant brought their own source of light, finding the corner and activating the space alone, interacting with it while listening to the audio track drawn from the artist's interview with their mother.

Corner of my room is a site specific public installation located in the corner of a building in the West Village, New York. Paired with its sister installation in Brooklyn, the two titles form an allegory of family relationships in exile and diaspora, questioning how physical distance shapes the fundamental structures of communication and connection between displaced parents and children.

In making this work, the artist sought new means of deeper connection with their own family by interviewing each of their parents. During the conversations, they showed a series of videos depicting abstract interplays of light and shadow, originally filmed from metal and reflective sculptures reacting to light over time in the corner of the artist's studio, and asked two open ended questions: what do you see, and why do you say that. The videos' abstraction evoked architectural or natural landscapes, inducing a sense of losing one's grip on space.

The artist's mother responded mostly with formal descriptions of the light and shadow, interwoven with specific memories and emotional stories tied to fear, sadness, or nostalgia, at times anticipating an imagined future.