This work is the culmination of three months as Java Arts’ inaugural artist-in-residence. Spanning photography, video, sculpture, and installation, The Space Between Inside/Outside examines the areas between the playful and the reflective, performance and the real, proximity and distance.

In uniting these layers of her work, the artist ties these different elements together with aesthetic and conceptual threads of the ‘white cube’ and a red stool.  As a counterpoint to the Western concept of the White Cube, the repeated use of the red stool, not only locates the artist within the individual works, but localizes the works themselves to their Cambodian context. Through her participatory approach and performances in public space, Anida seeks to circumvent what she perceives to be the limitations imposed by the confines of the traditional ‘white cube’ gallery space. Taking this as a visual motif, she references the formal art institution across this body of work.

For Enter the Studio, Enter the Frame, Anida demarcated an interactive studio with thick, black lines in her JavaArts residency space. In front of a camera, the artist invited people to interact by creating compositions with their bodies and a series of short red stools.  The responses were varied, fluctuating from the intimate, serious, to the jovial. These images have been reconfigured in parallel to those of the ’white cube’ in the interactive installation ‘View from Here’ which poses the provocation to come view and to be viewed.

Anida narrates and gives life to urban and rural locations, which previously evoked solitude. Playing with scale for dramatic effect, the exaggerated stool elevates the artist above the organic environments she inhabits. The masses of red textiles flowing from her body, interweaves between the foreground and background, connecting the panorama of people, spaces and moments. Through bodily movement and material, explosions of intense beauty arise amidst the contrasting backdrops of urban decay and dilapidation. The sculptural moment is enacted and captured as wind picks up the fabric, creating a billowing, graceful wave, injecting a temporary burst of red color into these spaces.

Situated somewhere between performance, event, and object, Anida’s practice explores personal and poetic ruminations on loss and life. These works merge and linger as measures of time and space; between here and there, inside and outside, between the past and what will pass.

(Natalie Pace, 2012)