Interview

Avery Z. Nelson (they/them) was born in Rhinebeck, NY and received their MFA from Columbia University. Recent solo exhibitions include the Rubber Factory (NYC) and JDJ | The Ice House (Garrison, NY). Nelson has received press in The Brooklyn Rail, ARTFORUM, Huffington Post, Bad at Sports, Newcity, and New American Paintings. They are a current resident of the Sharpe-Walentas studio program in Brooklyn and images of their work can be found on their website: www.averyznelson.com. They recently finished a book of selected diaries of Lou Sullivan, “We Both Laughed in Pleasure,” and would highly recommend to anyone looking for a delightful summer read.

Šejma Fere creates collages, mixed media artworks and installations. Her artworks deal with potential of multiple narratives. She is discovering hidden values and uses of found material to create new structures out of it. Her paintings are created in the mode of free associations from numerous fragments, using the recycled materials, technique of collage and digital process. There, by means of the non-linear narration about private sphere, she explores the entanglement of borders of intimate and public space and investigates the ideological constructs, gender stereotypes and the economic conditions that govern home and everyday life. Sewing patterns, lists, charts and statistic data appropriated from textbooks, documents, furniture catalogs and lifestyle magazines are parts of reality that intrude the private sphere and indicate a failed attempt to adapt to prescribed and homogenized world of mass culture. By superimposing one structure onto another, domestic surrounding is presented as a stage where characters live their reality brought by modern life and technology. These multiple perspectives create spatial and temporal disorientation. It is an open work where viewers fill the gaps and create their own interpretation, becoming a part of this imagined world. She graduated painting and printmaking. Lives and works in Belgrade.

In the interview Sejma mentioned the following;

Norient, audio visual gallery and community for the sound of the world.
“Among Women: Serbian Contemporary Art”, curated by Rachel Klipa, 937 Gallery, 937 Liberty Avenue, Pittsburgh, PA 15222 (opening on September 6, 2021)
“We are alive”, exhibition of Saša Stojanović and Šejma Fere, Gallery Šok Koridor, Art Klinika, Novi Sad (14 September-30 October, 2021 in Šok koriodor, Art klinika, Novi Sad)

Books mentioned:
Tomi Ungerer, children books, J.P. Oliva, L’isolation thermique écologique, Agatha Christie, An Autobiography, George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London.

Sopheap Pich b. 1971, Battambang, Cambodia. Lives and works in Phnom Penh, Cambodia.

Sopheap’s family left Cambodia as refugees in 1979.  Having first settled in camps in Thailand and the Philippines, they arrived in the United States in 1984 at age 13 years old and began his formal education.

He took art classes in Junior High School but shifted his passion to wood shop in high school and worked as a stagehand in college.  He first majored in Pre-Med but later switched to Fine Arts in his Sophomore year, a choice that allowed him to travel to France, Italy and Mexico and led him to spent a year in Paris studying at the national art school at Cergy Pontoise.  These travels impacted his views of the possibilities and limitations of art that have guided his thinking since.

He returned to Cambodia 2002.  And in 2004, began making sculptures using rattan and bamboo, his main materials to this day.  Aside from working on his art, he also owns a farm in the Kirirom Mountain areas where he plants hardwood trees, coconuts and date palms.

His works has been shown at dOCUMENTA 13, the Venice Biennale, the Asia Pacific Triennale, among others.  And are in major museums collections including the Metropolitan Museum, the Guggenheim, the National Gallery of Singapore, M+ Hong Kong, and the Centre Pompidou in Paris, among others.

Annie Jael Kwan is a curator and researcher whose exhibition-making, programming, publication and teaching practice is located at the intersection of contemporary art, cultural and pedagogical activism with an interest in archives, feminist, queer and alternative histories and knowledges, collective practice and solidarity. She is founder of Something Human, a curatorial platform focusing on intersectional live art that launched the landmark Southeast Asia Performance Collection in London in 2017, co-founder of Asia-Art-Activism, the interdisciplinary research network exploring the paradigm of “Asia” and its proximities in art and activism. She is the recipient of a Diverse Actions Leadership Award 2019, and the founding council member of Asia Forum 2021/2022 that will have its inaugural programme in Venice in 2021 at the Fondazione Querini Stampalia.