SEP 19–DEC 3, 2023
ART+PROCESS+IDEAS: LIAT BERDUGO, HEESOO KWON, RANU MUKHERJEE
The 2023 A+P+I exhibition features new work by artists-in-residence Liat Berdugo, Heesoo Kwon, and Ranu Mukherjee.
These three artists share approaches to artmaking that engage innovative uses of technology and performance to explore issues including migration, personal and political power, and the environment from feminist perspectives.
Liat Berdugo is an artist and writer whose work investigates embodiment, labor, and militarization in relation to capitalism, technological utopianism, and the Middle East. Her projects reflect different areas of her research, including decoding archived images of tree planting in Israel-Palestine to examine colonization, and using the artificial intelligence software ChatGPT to produce short plays and songs about the challenges of institutional change.
Heesoo Kwon is a multidisciplinary artist from South Korea currently based in the Bay Area. In 2017, Kwon initiated the autobiographical feminist religion Leymusoom as a framework to explore her family history and to create a utopian digital world in opposition to misogyny and patriarchy. Her hybrid videos, photographs, and installations combine archival family photographs and home videos with digital avatars and landscapes to create a freer and more empowered world for both ancestors and future generations.
Ranu Mukherjee makes hybrid work in painting, moving image, and installation that explores perspectives on time, energy, and power emerging from ruptured colonial legacies. Her new pieces map imaginary forests and mines to explore territories that are at once mythical, paradoxical, and at the frontlines of survival. She is interested in exploring non-human agencies (such as rare earth elements and lithium) simultaneously with analogous psychological territories (such as digging, vulnerability, and the unknown.) Interested in blending visual art and dance, the work includes inspiration from the history of modern dance at Mills. Her work is also an invitation to all visitors to physically explore and perform.
The A+P+I program was established in 2015 to support Bay Area artists who embrace experimentation and social consciousness in their work. The residency fosters interdisciplinary collaboration and provides opportunities for the Mills College at Northeastern University and wider Bay Area communities to interact, learn, and work with local contemporary artists.
The 2023 Art + Process + Ideas Artist Residency is supported through the generosity of the Agnes Cowles Bourne Fund for Special Exhibitions. Additional funding is provided by We Are the Voices, a Mellon Foundation Higher Learning funded project linking Mills College at Northeastern University students and faculty with poets and scholars working in Oakland and beyond.
THE ARTISTS
LIAT BERDUGO is an artist and writer whose work investigates embodiment, labor, and militarization in relation to capitalism, technological utopianism, and the Middle East. Her work has been exhibited and screened at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (San Francisco), MoMA PS1 (New York), Transmediale (Berlin), and The Wrong Biennale (online), among others. Her writing appears in Rhizome, Temporary Art Review, Real Life, Places, and The Institute for Network Cultures, among others, and her latest book is The Weaponized Camera in the Middle East. She is one half of the art collective, Anxious to Make, and is the co-founder of the Living Room Light Exchange, a monthly new media art series. Berdugo received an MFA from RISD and a BA from Brown University. She is currently an associate professor of Art + Architecture at the University of San Francisco. Berdugo lives and works in Oakland, CA.
HEESOO KWON is a multidisciplinary artist from South Korea currently in the Bay Area. Positioning herself as an artist, activist, archivist, anthropologist, and religious figure, Kwon builds feminist utopias in the digital realm that liberate one from personal, familial, and historical trauma rooted in patriarchy. Central to her practice and substantial bodies of work is Leymusoom, an autobiographical feminist religion she initiated in 2017 as a form of personal resistance against misogyny and an ever-evolving framework for investigating her family histories. Kwon utilizes technologies such as digital archiving, 3D scanning, and animation as her ritualistic and shamanistic tools to regenerate her woman ancestors’ lives without constraints of time and space, and to queer her past, present, and utopian dreams. Kwon earned an MFA from the University of California, Berkeley, and is Assistant Professor in the animation department at California College of the Arts in San Francisco.
RANU MUKHERJEE's collage-based paintings and film installations cultivate ecological, somatic, feminist and multidimensional perspectives on time, energy and power emerging from ruptured colonial legacies. Solo exhibitions and commissioned projects have been presented by 18th Street Arts Center, Los Angeles; de Young Museum, San Francisco; Pennsylvania College of Art and Design; Asian Art Museum, San Francisco; Tarble Art Center, Charleston, IL; San Jose Museum of Art, CA; Singapore Biennale 2022; Karachi Biennale 2019; and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Her work is held in the permanent collections of the Asian Art Museum, San Francisco; de young Museum, the JP Morgan Chase Collection, New York; the Kadist Foundation; the Oakland Museum of California; the San Jose Museum of Art and San Francisco Arts Commission, among others. In 2021, Gallery Wendi Norris released Shadowtime, a major monograph on Mukherjee's work over the past decade.
