October 30, 2021–February 20, 2022
Robert Street Window Gallery
The M is proud to present Sutures, an exhibition that brings together an emerging generation of artists who challenge straightforward ways of looking—at a photograph, a video, a loved one, a collective history, a memory, or oneself—through layered, multimedia artistic practices. Artists Cheryl Mukherji, Prune Phi, Sopheak Sam, and Daniella Thach use screen printing, projection, neon, and collage to explore the complexities of seemingly “fixed” images, identities, and ideas.
Sutures was curated by Suriya Khuth as a culmination of their fellowship with the Emerging Curators Institute, a Twin Cities organization that supports the professional development of curators from diverse backgrounds. The show also reflects Khuth’s interest in the unique opportunities presented by the M’s street-facing exhibition spaces, which visitors can experience from the sidewalk, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.
Seeing New Potentialities: A Conversation between Suriya Khuth, Cheryl Mukherji, Prune Phi, Sopheak Sam, and Daniella Thach on Sutures.
This conversation between exhibition curator Suriya Khuth and featured artists Cheryl Mukherji, Prune Phi, Sopheak Sam, and Daniella Thach centers on this emerging generation of visual artists who draw on imagery from everyday sources—including family photo albums, the Internet, and print media—to shape new ways of understanding themselves, their communities, and the past/present/future.
Cheryl Mukherji (born 1995, India) is a visual artist and writer currently living and working in Brooklyn, New York. She graduated with an MFA in Advanced Photographic Studies from the International Center of Photography-Bard College, New York in 2020. Cheryl has been a recipient of the ICP Director’s Fellowship for the years 2018-2020.
In her current work, Cheryl explores the idea of origin and inheritance, which is embedded in the figure of her mother and her presence in the family album. It deals with memory, personal history, transgenerational trauma, and how they inform identity. Cheryl primarily works with photography, text, and video. Cheryl has been the recent recipient of Capture Photography Festival’s Writing Prize, Brooklyn Museum’s #Your2020Portrait award, South Asian Arts Resiliency Fund (SAARF), Firecracker Photography Grant, and was nominated for the inaugural Next Step Award by Aperture Foundation and Baxter St at the Camera Club of New York. Her work has been exhibited at the Format Photo Festival (UK), Brooklyn Museum (US) Museum of Moving Image (US) International Center of Photography (US) Serendipity Arts Festival (IN).
Cheryl Mukherji
The Last Time, 2020
text on vellum, text with screen print on paper
I Held My Mother, 2020
embroidered cotton in resin
I Held My Mother, 2020
inkjet on cotton lawn
Trigger Warning: Mention of self-harm
In Cheryl Mukherji’s The Last Time and I Held My Mother, Mukherji merges together photographs of her mother, Prabhati, and her own writings to explore notions of inheritance and healing. Through a series of 17 vellum screenprints and embroidered tapestry/towel cloths, Mukherji brings to light her mother’s history of mental illness and the complexities of their mother-daughter relationship among photographs of weddings and smiling family portraits. Mukherji’s work recollects memories of her last day at home with her mother before moving to New York—the day her mother, overcome by mania and overwhelmed by loneliness, self-harmed in front of Mukherji.
Through acts of mark-making—screen printing, embroidery, and writing—Mukherji intervenes within her family’s album by revisiting and reconciling with her mother’s attempt at self-harm. In her MFA thesis book, “Shape of an Answer”, Mukherji writes, “…Maa, if you read this: through every day of making this work, I have only learned more about who you are, beyond what I have articulated in it. Through you, I have learned who I am”. By altering and stitching together various images and memories of her mother, Mukherji creates a body of work where remembering is synonymous with becoming, and where wounds can begin to heal.
Prune Phi (born 1991, Toulouse, France) is a French-Vietnamese artist. Phi creates installations made from photographs, drawings, collages, collected documents, texts, and videos. Her research involves collecting materials from the Vietnamese diasporas in France, the USA, or from Vietnam to explore collective histories and reconstitute the missing parts often distorted by fiction. Phi is particularly drawn towards how identity and memory are expressed through the body and how physical traits can be passed on over several generations, or on the contrary, disappear over time. Often veiled by hidden memories, silences caused by traumas and therefore unsaid, her projects evoke the missing parts of identities and give shape to lost heritages.
After pursuing her Masters in Artistic Creation, Theory and Mediation, as well as a one-year residency at the Birmingham Institute of Art and Design in England, she graduated from l’Ecole Nationale Supérieure de la Photographie d’Arles (France) in 2018. Her work has been exhibited in France, Europe and Internationally at the Rencontres Internationales de la Photographie d’Arles, France (2018), at Festival Circulation(s) at Le 104, Paris, France (2019), at La Villette in Paris, France (2021) and at the Vincom Contemporary Center for Art (VCCA) in Hanoï, Vietnam (2021).
Prune Phi
Long Distance Call, 2017-2018
photography, tape, crayon, text, video
In Long Distance Call, Prune Phi grapples with familial silence and fragmented answers in order to piece together her family’s history. After a phone call with a distant uncle in 2017, Prune decided to visit her family in San Jose, California. When she arrived and posed questions to help her better understand her family’s displacement in the aftermath of the Vietnam or American War, Phi was met with silence.
Resorting to magazine clippings found on the streets of Little Saïgon, documentary stills, and family portraits, Phi rips and tapes together pieces of a puzzle even though none of the pieces seem to fit. The negative spaces within Phi’s photo-collages begin to form a question: what visual, oral, written histories do we inherit, and what memories are ultimately left to fade into oblivion? Phi’s Long Distance Call asks us to listen a little longer, for we might begin to hear who is on the other line—the hum of the dial tone, the clink of plates at a crowded dinner table, or waves crashing to the sides of a boat searching for a new home.
Sopheak Sam (born 1989, Khao-I-Dang, Thailand) is a United States-based artist who draws from disparate sources of theory, history, and popular media to arrive at sites of power and pleasure. Combining research, imagination, and their lived experience, Sam’s artistic impulse works through an entanglement of ideas exploring desire, memory, alienation, belonging, and spirituality. This often manifests in counter-narratives, queer revisionism, and/or unnerving—sometimes humorous—depictions of intimacy. Sam often works intuitively with an interdisciplinary practice rooted in painting and drawing. Currently, their studio practice is informed by the complexities of queer representation on film in Southeast Asia, and how that influences SEA geopolitics and the diversity of queer expression.
Sam is of Khmer descent, and was born on the Thai-Cambodian border to refugee parents. They are currently a graduate post-baccalaureate candidate in Studio Art at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts. Sam holds a BFA in Painting and Interrelated Media from Massachusetts College of Art and Design where they graduated with honors.
They identify as non-binary queer, and uses both he/him and they/them pronouns.
Sopheak Sam
បាត់សាសនាខ្ញុំ (Losing My Religion), 2021
multi-channel video installation; HD color and sound
Piecing together videos sourced from the internet, បាត់សាសនាខ្ញុំ (Losing My Religion) comes to grips with the overlooked, often fraught and fragmented media representation of Cambodian history, heritage, and popular culture in the aftermath of the Cambodian genocide under Pol Pot’s brutal regime. By mining visual and sensory material culture from a post-Khmer Rouge era, Sam traces and searches for imagery that complicates contemporary Cambodian identity; one that is layered, tragic, joyful, nostalgic, beautiful, spiritual and evolving. This amalgamation is depicted within the work in a process the artist refers to as “video collaging.”
Sam explains:
My decision to include the final clips are deeply personal in my own understanding of what it means to be Khmer on film and video, specifically as a refugee child who did not experience the traumas of war first-hand but inherited them—and through this, subconsciously developed a complex and nebulous visualization of Cambodian identity—in all its muddled glory. This piece attempts to offer a more layered picture of Cambodian culture and historiography, albeit I acknowledge it is still very incomplete.
Projecting videos onto pedestals and traditional Cambodian items acts as a poetic meditation on animism—the belief system in Theravada Buddhism that all objects carry spiritual essence. Taking inspiration from myths, cosmology, and folklore, Sam creates this altar-like presence to consider what Cambodians have lost, and what they have gained.
From the artist:
My deepest gratitude to Lena Sarunn, Sophornya Ricky Orng, Katytarika Bartel, my parents Yean Mom and Proeun Sam, and my family, for allowing me to borrow these objects to display in this installation.
Daniella Thach (born 1998, Chicago, Illinois) is a multimedia light artist living and working in Northern Illinois. As a response to a mother tongue they never inherited, Thach creates a new visual language by drawing from old and new forms of light. Experimenting with harmonizing digital and analog lighting allows Thach to translate her desire, and inability, to preserve familial and cultural traditions in the midst of assimilation. In combining nearly obsolete sources of light with new technological advances, Thach uses neon, digital projection, and artificial intelligence to reflect on generational loss and the formation of a new identity.
Thach is of Khmer and Vietnamese descent. They graduated from The School of Art Institute of Chicago. Thach identifies as non-binary queer and uses they/them and she/her pronouns.
Daniella Thach
As An Apsara, 2020
Krypton, transformer, projection, and artificial intelligence
Daniella Thach’s As an Apsara blurs together scenes from found family videos and King Norodom Sihanouk’s film Apsara (1966) in order to form a new language, one that Thach can bend and shape to articulate her fragmented relationship with her Cambodian heritage. In this work, Thach draws on childhood memories of the Aspara—a celestial dancer found in Hindu mythology—that took the form of wooden statues and tableaus. The artist explores this figure as a powerful symbol of tradition and femininity.
Thach uses artificial intelligence technology to reappropriate an excerpt of a video recording of Princess Norodom Bopha Devi performing the Apsara Dance—a performance well known among Cambodians within the diaspora. As Devi’s hands bend into the shapes of snakes and flowers, the video begins to fade into family recordings of Thach’s mother, Yeay (grandmother), and Mings (aunts), smiling back at the camera. Although Thach is unable to speak her mother tongue to these women in her family, Thach has found a language that glows and honors her family’s heritage in ways they can begin to understand.
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