This new exhibition Thinking and Feeling with the Marshall Islands is part of the Manifest Differently project developed and directed by Kim Shuck and Megan Wilson. Over the next year 2023/24, and working with 38 diverse, multigenerational visual/media artists and poets, Manifest Differently seeks to unpack “the expansionist ideology of Manifest Destiny, its continuing impact on the multicultural & multi-ethnic communities in the SF Bay Area and beyond, its legacies of perpetuated violence, the inherited trauma & addiction, and the outgrowth of resistance and resilience.”
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?
Opening Reception: Thursday, October 26th, 6-8pm @ Artist Television Access, 992 Valencia Street, San Francisco, CA (Transportation: 24th St. BART; paid and free street parking available) | Free and open to the public
Special Thanks to: Ariel Zaccheo & Fara Akrami at ATA, Katayoun Bahrami, David Goldberg, Trisha Lagaso Goldberg, Hilda Heine, Evelyn Joseph, Thomas Kijiner, Jr., Marie Maddison, Amenta Matthews, Carolina Quintanilla at SOMArts, Tanvi Shah, Tosh Tanaka, Ariana Tibon, Veronica Torres, Yone Wase, Megan Wilson, and to my students
Further Resources
Heather Davis and Zoe Todd, “On the Importance of a Date, or, Decolonizing the Anthropocene,” ACME an international e-journal for critical geographies 16, no. 4 (2017)
Kathy Jetn̄il-Kijiner, Iep Jāltok : Poems from a Marshallese Daughter, Tucson: The University of Arizona Press, 2017
Jo-Jikum, a community-based environmental youth organization in the Marshall Islands
Marshallese Educational Initiative, a community service organization in Springdale, AR
Pacific Resources for Education and Learning a non-profit education organization working from Hawai‘i, American Sāmoa, the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, Guam, the Republic of the Marshall Islands, the Republic of Palau, and the Federated States of Micronesia: Chuuk, Kosrae, Pohnpei, and Yap
Craig Santos Perez, “Thinking (and feeling) with Anthropocene (Pacific) islands,” Dialogues in Human Geography 11, no. 3 (2021)
U.S. Department of Energy Full Committee Hearing to Receive Testimony Regarding the Compact of Free Association Amendments Act of 2023 (July 13, 2023)