The Red Chador: Becoming ROGUE

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Anida Yoeu Ali (b. 1974, Cambodian American) is an interdisciplinary artist and global agitator who works across performance, new media, and installation to challenge reigning narratives about the boundaries of identity. Ali interrogates overly simplified representations of who a person is and can be through larger-than-life personas. The Red Chador: Becoming Rogue is the latest iteration of one of these characters. Born a decade ago in Paris during heightened Islamophobia, this emblematic figure dons a chador, a garment that covers the head and body worn by some Muslim women.

The body has been a contested site in political struggles, claimed by religious, governmental, rebel, and activist groups to mold their visions of society[1]. The Red Chador series engages this terrain in stark opposition to any sense of conformity that casts Muslim women as submissive. In this exhibition, Ali debuts all new work including two lines of 14 chadors, two neon works, six images, and The Red Chador: Stranded, a film made in collaboration with Masahiro Sugano.

A Muslim woman of mixed Malay, Cham, Khmer, and Thai ancestries, Ali’s fabric-focused art honors her ancestors’ migration across Southeast Asia. Born in Battambang, Cambodia, on the precipice of the Khmer Rouge regime’s rise to power and years of Cold War armed conflict, Ali became a refugee in 1979 and resettled with her family in the United States as a child. Resettlement dislodged Ali from the center of her mixed heritage and rooted her in a fragmentary diaspora. Without the constant reinforcement of cultural plurality of the homeland, Ali’s family instilled in her Khmer-Malay-Thai-Muslim heritage. Significantly, this included the gift of a telekung as a teenager. Like a chador, the telekung is the Malay word for a full-body prayer garment worn Muslim women.

Conflicting stereotypes dominate narratives about Muslim women’s choice to wear body coverings[2]. Women who wear the chador are accused of being oppressed victims of a patriarchal backward religion. Elsewhere, the chador is entangled with women’s bodies and behaviors as the location of national, religious, and cultural identity that must be fiercely guarded and narrowly defined. Through The Red Chador series, Ali resists these instrumentalizations of Muslim women. In her latest appearance, Becoming Rogue, she invites visitors to stand with Muslim women and join the resistance by immersing them in The Red Chador’s boudoir.

Becoming Rogue is The Red Chador’s luxury walk-in closet, and much to the dismay of those who would like to conceal her, her closet is red, bold and bright. On the walls hang six fashion editorial style photographs that capture the lavish dynamism of the chador in motion. Near them, neon artworks glimmer, “What is it you fear?” a reference to an earlier performance, and “Feminism + Fabulousness.” The centerpiece of the exhibition are two new lines of 14 chadors that are made from flowing fabrics of shimmering varieties. While one collection features iridescent, celebratory, and floral patterns sourced from the open-air markets of Phnom Penh and Bangkok, the other is premium minimalist, something The Red Chador might wear incognito to a café and was made from a donation of fabric from The Jim Thompson Art Center.

While galleries are often places where artworks become artifacts behind a glass case, Ali and the Warin Lab lower the barriers between visitors and the art on display. Guests are encouraged not just to look but perform The Red Chador by wearing and photographing themselves in any of the marvelous chadors using the bespoke selfie stage. In doing so, guests approach the experience of the Muslim woman as a mark of solidarity. A selection of these photos will gradually appear in the exhibition, culminating in 99 images, an auspicious Islamic number that refers to the 99 names of Allah (God).

Additionally, Becoming Rogue presents The Red Chador: Stranded, a video work that documents The Red Chador and her Rainbow Brigade as they move through Gurambilbarra, commonly known by the settler colonialist name Townsville, Australia. Emerging from a forest, the veiled figures are conjured during a smoking ceremony performed by elders of the aboriginal Bindal people, Alfred Smallwood and R. John Phillips. As the figures make their way, there is a mutual encounter between them and the townspeople that echoes both whimsy and apprehension. A recurring frame shows a red chador drifting in clear water. While the exhibition pulls the visitor into The Red Chador’s closet, the film visualizes a world beyond her interior: one layered with the beliefs and values of people but also grounded in the literal terrestrial material from which all humans draw life. Ali’s provocation through The Red Chador: Becoming Rogue invites visitors to try the chador on for size. Step into the role of an agitator and view the world through The Red Chador’s veil, experiencing a moment of solidarity with Muslim women.

[1] This notion of body politics is indebted to the work of Michel Foucault, an introduction to which can be found in ‘The Political Investment in the Body,’ in Fraser, M. and Greco, M. (eds.) The Body: A Reader. London: Routledge, pp. 100–104.

[2] For further discussion on Islamophobia and representation, see Terman, R. (2017) ‘Islamophobia and media portrayals of Muslim women: A computational text analysis of US news coverage’, International Studies Quarterly, 61(3), pp. 489–502.