Eco/Systems: Gather Opening Reception

Artists: Bassem Yousri, Eurhi Jones, Narendra Haynes

Eco/Systems: Gather continues to build on Asian Arts Initiative’s yearlong exploration of contemporary climate movements. The season started with a group exhibition of fifteen artists and collectives showing works that contemplate their relationship to place. We’ve since invited our audience to swap seeds, to make tinctures, and to consider their own place in the land, the sky, the sea, and with each other. As we complete one trip around the sun contemplating Eco/Systems, we move to the themes of fall & winter: of harvesting, of gathering, of death and decomposition.

Asian Arts Initiative presents three artists whose works embody these themes. Bassem Yousri (visual artist, filmmaker, and art educator, based between Cairo and Berlin, born Egypt) presents a sculptural work sourced from the waste stream, during his time as an artist-in-residence at Revolution Recovery with the Recycled Artist-in-Residence (RAIR) program. Narendra Haynes (interdisciplinary artist, based in Philadelphia, born Detroit, Michigan), also a RAIR resident, presents a body of works made in collaboration with mealworm beetles. Over the course of the exhibit, live Mealworm beetles will be actively metabolizing & decomposing styrofoam waste, sourced from Chinatown and from the Superfund site at RAIR. And Eurhi Jones (multimedia artist, Korean/Welsh-American) presents a participatory installation, inviting audience members to contribute and consider the thousands of bits of single-use household plastics that make up the installation.

Please join us October 13th for the exhibit's reception.

Curated by Dave Kyu.

Funding for this exhibition was provided in part by The Mellon Foundation, William Penn Foundation & The Ford Foundation.