C. Grace Chang, Friisgatan 19 D, Malmö (2026)

Through a mix of Virtual Reality, performance, and installation, she explores queer diasporas, decoloniality, and the tension between hypervisibility and invisibility imposed on people of color.

20/09/2024

So psyched to be moderating this panel talk tomorrow with for !

We kick off at 14:00 with a screening of Archives of Oblivion (30min) at . After, we’ll start the talk “Art and Collective Memory: The Politics of Remembrance”!

We’ll get into both projects and dive into remembrance beyond trauma—who gets to be remembered, how, and by whom? Whose stories are permitted (by whom) to endure and in what contexts?

16/09/2024

Exhibition photos for the artwork on the lower floor of right now: “Every lost story is a hungry ghost” (2024). This installation uses projection on embossed gold metallic fabric and mixed audio from both the film and a lyric essay I wrote and recorded at .

Projecting onto this shimmering, textured fabric makes the video feel as if it’s appearing on running water.

The lyric essay (which took 7 different recording sessions to get right, btw!!) shifts between personal and collective loss, migration, buried histories, the long fight for civil rights and social justice, moments of tenderness, and the intertwining of decay and growth/movement. The repeated effort to regrow what was trampled/burned/excised both out of history and out of our individual lives.

I really wanted to write something that wove together the personal effects of the political, and the political effects of the personal. That theory and history are lived—are alive—and full of emotion and personal (and collective) ramifications.

The video component is one of the last remaining recordings I have a rotting pier in Edgewater, New Jersey, right by where I grew up. It overlooks upper Manhattan, and it used to be part of a grand restaurant, which was on a decommissioned historic steamboat on the Hudson. It rotted slowly over the course of many years after a bad storm in the early 2000s. I’d watched it in intervals and, after moving to Sweden, I’d check in with it during each visit, watching it decay over time. Like my life back home was withering away with it. The New York I remembered was also going/gone. A thought that didn’t really hit me until my grandmother’s passing in 2014. I looked at the Hudson and felt like it looked back at all this, like some undying witness.

I wanted this work to feel like it could speak to the bigness and intertwined nature of this particular experience. A weird but common gordian knot of things.

Photo credit:

12/09/2024

Detail from “A Thousand Flowers”, an installation on view at til Oct 6. There are ~1000 sticks of incense in this sand atop this bright raspberry podium.

The sticks are what was left after several filming attempts to make the video component of the artwork “As smoke unfurling”, located on the gallery’s upper floor. I’d thought about each individual stick as a marker of the ritual that had burned it down, of the time and effort spent. I also started to think of them as markers of people and stories that have disappeared from our memories over time. Wandering spirits and information whose passing should be marked somehow, even if the details are forever gone.

I went back and forth with putting the sticks in the gallery. In the end, it felt like the right choice. The exhibition is as much about growth, connection, and rebirth as it is about remains and decay.

Plus, I can’t seem to resist a bit of trash now and then. (My phone storage is probably 70% photos of my dog. 5% lovely memories. 25% weird things I find on the ground in public.)

11/09/2024

Some images from my exhibition at !! (Aug 31-Oct 6.

Artist talk Wednesday, Sept 18, 16-17 at Lund University (LUX building, room C121).

“As smoke unfurling” (3-channel installation) was the first work that took shape in my mind, long before the curator ever contacted me about doing a show. It’s gone through a few phases. I added text, took it out. Tried filming alone 2x until (camera wizard extraordinaire), and agreed to help me out with the shoot. Twice!

What I wanted most was a feeling of quiet and possibility. Inspired by Sino/Chinese and other East Asian traditions of ancestor worship, I personally felt viewed this as a space of remembrance and contemplation. If you’re familiar with these kinds of ancestor worship, you’ll see the references to the Mid-Autumn Festival. But I tried to open the experience in other ways, so that if you miss the references, you could hopefully still come away with something. Though if anybody comes in and only feels relaxing seaside vibes, that’s fine by me! (Rest/refuge is also vital. If this space can give them that, I have no intention of invalidating that need.)

All works in this exhibition were new commissions ordered by curator , whose patience and generosity I won’t soon forget. 💙

Photos by the talented

Adress

Friisgatan 19 D
Malmö
214 21

Webbplats

http://www.cgracechang.com/

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C. Grace Chang