Artist Talk, Performance and Closing Reception | Dig & Rise
Artists Lani Asunción, Meghana Bisineer, Paola de la Calle, and Trina Michelle Robinson present their work on Thursday, Sep 21st, 5:30 pm – 7:00 pm with a performance by Lani Asunción at 7:00 pm, and closing reception for the insightful Dig and Rise, 2022-2023 Fellowship Exhibition at Kala Gallery, 2990 San Pablo Ave, Berkeley, CA 94702.
Events Timeline | Sep 21st:
Artist Talk 5:30pm
Performance by Lani Asunción 7:00pm
Participating Artists:
Lani Asunción is a Boston based interdisciplinary artist creating socially engaged art. Their work weaves together a visual language guided by historical research, community engagement, and experimental performance connected to their identity as a queer multiracial Filipinx-American. The work in this exhibition, Binakol Blessings: Song/Land/Sea is a multimedia installation that follows climate changes such as excessive rain created floods in the Bay Area in California and sea levels rising in the Seaport in Boston, Mass., as well as in Hawaii overseas in the Pacific. Their work explores how historical connections to militarization along with urban development have shifted the landscape in ways that have caused pollution and vulnerability to these quickly shifting environmental changes.
Meghana Bisineer is an Indian born artist, curator and educator. Her work in the exhibition Beautiful In-between is a multifaceted installation that explores foreignness, the sense of belonging, and ways of connection. Captivated by a gesture of machismo in Claire Denis’ 1999 film Beau Travail, Meg’s work turns the gesture over and into a multitude of others. The gestures recreated in animation are interspersed and overlaid with found footage, and they explore the space between bodies. Other video components in the installation expand these gestures into mudra’s from Bharatanatyam, a traditional south Indian dance Meg practiced as a child, that connects the dance and the dancer with the divine.
Paola de la Calle is a Colombian-American multidisciplinary artist whose work examines home, identity, borders, and nostalgia through the use of textiles, printmaking, and sculpture. Her work in the exhibition is an exploration of archives, evidence and memory, examining the socio-political relationship between the United States and Colombia. For her, objects are important portals into memories, personal and political histories. In her practice she pulls meaning from the mundane materials and elements. By using coffee and iron ink in her work, the images will begin to erode and be transformed overtime, reminding us how our memory and retelling works within us.
Trina Michelle Robinson explores the relationship between memory and migration through installation, film, print media and archival materials. Her work has been shown at many galleries and museums, and film festivals throughout the country. Trina’s installation Go West spotlights the unique feeling of the Western migration to California by some of her ancestors beginning around 1906 following a move to Chicago from Kentucky in 1866. Combining the archival footage and text, alongside scenes of the 2023 superbloom in California following months of severe rainstorms, Trina’s work captures the upheaval and beauty of her family’s migration, while at the same time recognizing that there is still an indescribable feeling that total freedom has still not been realized.
Event Details
Date: September 21, 2023
Time: 5:30 pm–8:00 pm
Kala Gallery
2990 San Pablo Ave, Berkeley, CA 94702