Stories. Barriers. Absence. Artifacts and objects. Conversations with my peers and professors during seminar at the New School, the gravity and sheer injustice of this topic, the tremendous talent and power of Kosal’s poetry, my friends and city that push boundaries and challenges conventions with creativity. As I’m about to graduate college, it’s helped me to realize there are so many mediums through which to execute my learning, and making art is something that I have always thrived off of. Since I had never pursued art in an academic setting, the curatorial workshop helped me to explore how I might combine what I once saw as disparate fields. New York offers opportunity to create dialogue, and the work in the show hopefully invokes that to the audience. It questions issues we don’t experience every day.

Narrative and storytelling is a very powerful way to elicit common ground. Incarcerated youth and deportees are often dehumanized in the system and media. Connecting to an audience in a way that humanizes the issue is central to the value I place in art. I also find it extremely important that I recognize and utilize my positions of privilege and points of access in order to realize this project. This includes my citizenship status. Kosal cannot be here. Unless the laws change, he and thousands of deportees exiled in Cambodia will never return. How can you possibly collaborate on something as hands on as art, with someone who cannot physically be here? How can he tell his story to a New York audience? This is both a part of the concept and the challenge.

It is also really important to me that the work is widely accessible and not confined to white-wall gallery spaces. This is why I want it to occupy public spaces with a lot of movement. I want to make what is invisible visible. We don’t see what exists behind prison walls and national borders, and so it enters dialogue in a contrived way. It needs to be seen, heard, and put it on the street, by people who have experienced it on the inside.

Art has an ability to reach people in different way. I want people to take away the raw emotion. People can interact on a very personal level with the pieces, even touch his face if they want and listen to his voice. As an artist, I want to physicalize concepts in ways that are viscerally felt. Have the pieces wash over the audience but be poignant to stay with them.

My goal, through my work, is to invoke dialogue and encourage visitors to question their own assumptions of the deportation of Cambodian refugees and humanize their stories. I believe that narrative and storytelling are very powerful tools elicit common ground and expose the historical context of U.S. foreign policy with Cambodia, which has continually concealed and remained unaccountable for acts of violence, banishment, and separation of families.

The curatorial workshop provided me an opportunity to experiment with my concept, and see how visitors engaged with some of the material, so that I can take it further. Kosal and I are collaborating on a sort of exhibition, performance, or street installation where the featured artist doesn’t show up because they have lost their right to be here. I want to pose to the audience, if you can’t legally bring back a person’s physical body, what can you bring home in order to humanize their story and personhood? So far we have objects like body castings, journals, sketchbooks, immigration documents, photographs and recordings. As a long-term goal, I hope that its impact will reach beyond public awareness and toward informed political action that is grounded in social justice.