Olivia Leigh Andersson

My work explores the relationship between ritual, material, and narrative through a queer, trans non-binary, mixed-race lens. I combine family artifacts and oral histories with found objects to sift through intergenerational memories. For example, by reenacting and recontextualizing the ritual of making kimchi, I queer the ritual and disrupt the gendered narrative of fermentation. Historically, fermenting kimchi is a process enacted by and preserved by generations of women; often, the knowledge of the ritual is passed down matrilineally. By inserting the queer and trans-non-binary subject in the ritual, I create space for imagined frameworks of a generational lineage that emboldens queer narrative. Queering kimchi and fermentation becomes a site for dialogue, healing, community, and softness.

While constructing assemblages of past and present, I investigate how queerness impacts experiences with time. This notion of queer temporality holds space for grief, loss, and dysphoria caused by intergenerational effects of immigration, assimilation, and gendered social geographies. I examine non-normative perceptions of time through acts of fermenting, sitting, and fragmenting, across various methods of making work. By combining performance, video, sculpture, and installation, I queer ritual and material to gesture toward diasporic queerness and abstracted ancestral connections. In doing so, I reconceptualize lived experience, family memory, and history to construct a foundation for imagining an Asian American queer futurity.