California-based artist and activist, Haruko Tanaka, explores how cultural representation is largely a matter of negotiation in her current exhibition of video, photographs, and a site-specific sculpture installation at CUE. Recent photographs along with a suspended sculpture installation made up of 1,000 grocery bags folded into triangles reveal the simplicity and complexity, tradition and nuance of culture as shown through routine familial rituals. Her most recent installment to her ongoing video series examines the diversity of place and language by conveying the distance between feelings and words, image and sound. Tanaka’s layered examination of identity through the metaphor of exchange ultimately presents a complex commentary on the transmission and interpretation of culture through gestures, images, text, and sounds as cultural signifiers. Through the process of observation, instruction, translation and transliteration, she creates a non-homogenous, transnational, multilingual and seemingly contradictory sense of reality, which fully explores both the gaps and links that guide the cognitive process.

Curated by Cindy Bernard

Performance Feb. 3 at 4 pm