Public Program
Charting Personal Histories Across Borders
Monday, April 15th, 2024
In-person and Virtual Event
Advance registration required
The Institute of Fine Arts
1 East 78th Street
New York, NY 10075
On the occasion of the 2024 Spring exhibition, Once we leave a place is it there, the Great Hall Exhibition Program is pleased to present a panel discussion, “Charting Personal Histories Across Borders.” The interdisciplinary conversation will feature members of the NYU scholarly community—Sonia Das, christina ong, and Dina M. Siddiqi.
At the exhibition’s center is a newly commissioned installation, Bondage Baggage Banner, (2024), which features five vibrant banners individually painted in black, white, yellow, blue, and red—hues that together constitute obangsaek, the five cardinal directions and elements in Korean culture. Before the banners is a jesa-sang, a Korean offering table for ancestors, with an ongoing accumulation of contributions from the exhibition viewers. It references both the Korean tradition of jesa, practiced within the domestic home, and public offerings from Buddhist temples Lee encountered during her upbringing in Nepal.
As Bondage Baggage Banner reflects how migration shapes one’s identity through the fusion of different cultures, this discussion explores the frictions that arise in placing a jesa-sang within the French Classical architecture of the James B. Duke House. Purposefully interdisciplinary, the conversation brings scholars outside of art history to discuss Lee’s exhibition in dialogue with themes of domesticity, gender, and translation, and the role of personal histories in studying the movement of religions, cultures, and ideas across borders.
Sonia Das is the Associate Professor of Linguistic Anthropology at NYU, and a Senior Fellow at the Andrew W. Mellon Society of Fellow. Her book Linguistic Rivalries received the Honorable Mention for the Sapir Book Prize in 2017. Dr. Das’s research spans linguistic nationalism in Quebec, colonial linguistic projects in French India and French Guiana, commercial seafaring practices, and inequalities in police-civilian interactions. She previously served as the Editor-In-Chief to Journal of Linguistic Anthropology.
christina ong is a Visiting Scholar at the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU currently working as the co-curator for Legacies: Asian American Art Movements in New York City (1969-2001) opening in September 2024 at NYU’s 80WSE Gallery. Her own research uncovers how diasporas create community through place-based activism and art production. She has a PhD in Sociology from the University of Pittsburgh.
Dina M. Siddiqi is the Clinical Associate Professor of Liberal Studies, and a cultural anthropologist. Her research focuses on the gender justice systems and the impacts of the global garment industry in Bangladesh through the lens of critical development studies, transnational feminist theory, and the anthropology of labor and Islam. Dr. Siddiqi serves on the editorial boards of Contemporary South Asia, Dialectical Anthropology, Journal of Bangladesh Studies, and Routledge’s Women in Asia publication series.