Wednesday, September 17 at 7:00 pm
In the multi-screen project SRS (Silk Road Songbook), Millie Chen and Arzu Ozkal weave together images and sound in such a way that the evocation of the limitless sense of possibility persistently presents itself. Videos depicting open (though not barren) landscapes from Istanbul, Tehran, Tashkent, Bishkek, and Xi'an are presented with accompanying songs specific to the location along the historical "Silk Road." That road and its historical relevance have typically been framed from Western perspectives: a trade route brought about by Europeans' fascination with distant lands — their spices, their fabrics, their exotic otherness. The work counters the conventional narrative of these trade routes and the Eurocentric presumptions around them.
While the work is not explicitly about immigration as we know it today, it does direct attention to ...