Thinking and Feeling with the Marshall Islands

Location:
Exhibition at ATA (Sept 29-Oct 31)

Thinking and Feeling with the Marshall Islands is a window installation created by Anita Chang and featuring the works of her Communication students at Cal State East Bay in her 2022 Ecomedia course. Chang brings her work-in-progress documentary Her Excellency on women leaders, with the video poem of Nang Hlaing, memes of Cindy Kim, and the poetry of Brooklyn Aguilar, Adriana Fimbres, Lyanne Nisperos, David Oronos, Alexis Peck, and Alexandria Sepulveda. Together, these works explore what it means to think and feel with the Marshall Islands and broadly, as inspired by poet scholar Craig Santos Perez, the “Anthopocene (Pacific) islands.” How do we also imagine what decolonizing the Anthropocene might look like in order to manifest differently?

a view looking into a wide storefront window, where the interior space is painted in a bold sky blue, but the floor is covered by brown paper that has a long verse written upon it. Two mounted TV screens each display a video of some sort, while two other artistic images are suspended in the air, as if from unseen wires above.

Thinking and Feeling with the Marshall Islands is a window installation created by Anita Chang and featuring the works of her Communication students at Cal State East Bay in her 2022 Ecomedia course. Chang brings her work-in-progress documentary Her Excellency on women leaders, with the video poem of Nang Hlaing, memes of Cindy Kim, and the poetry of Brooklyn Aguilar, Adriana Fimbres, Lyanne Nisperos, David Oronos, Alexis Peck, and Alexandria Sepulveda. Together, these works explore what it means to think and feel with the Marshall Islands and broadly, as inspired by poet scholar Craig Santos Perez, the “Anthopocene (Pacific) islands.” How do we also imagine what decolonizing the Anthropocene might look like in order to manifest differently?

Artist
Artist
Artist

Anita Chang

Anita Chang is an artist who works with various media forms, including film, digital video, photography, installation and the web. She was born to parents who immigrated to the U.S. from Taiwan in the 1960’s, fleeing a dictatorship. She grew up in Akron, Ohio and Massachusetts. Chang received her BA in American Studies and English at Tufts University, an MFA in Cinema at San Francisco State University and her doctorate in Film and Digital Media from University of California at Santa Cruz. She has worked as a community activist, an urban youth counselor, civil rights investigator, and education director for a non-profit San Francisco-based media literacy organization.

She has attended artist residencies in Nepal, Headlands Center for the Arts, Taipei Artist Village, and Hweilan International Artists’ Workshop. In pushing the boundaries of the moving image medium, she is always discovering ways to experiment with content and form, inspiring an active viewing experience. She is a recipient of a Creative Capital Grant, National Geographic All Roads Grant, and Fulbright Lecturing Award.