In Mind and Memory presents two research-based artistic collaborations. Using multiple-channel video and still photographs, these two pairs of artists respond in their works to experiences of being marginalized in a globally-connected world. Autobiographical inquiry takes on abstracted, poetic form in Baghdadi Mem/Wars (2010) by Dena al-Adeeb and Sama Alshaibi, which references the artists’ personal and family histories of war and migration from Iraq to the United States. State of Mind (2008) by Annica Karlsson Rixon and Anna Viola Hallberg is a documentary-based body of work about LGBTQ communities in St. Petersburg, Russia, in which first-person narratives are presented simultaneously in an installation alongside family portrait photos of their subjects. In both bodies of work, identity is complicated by other realities, necessitating a camouflage approach to social constructs. In this condition, the self retains autonomy only within the mind’s interior.

Worth Ryder Art Gallery, University of California, Berkeley, CA. September 28-October 22, 2011.