Tacoma-based international artist Anida Yoeu Ali makes her SAM debut with this solo exhibition that celebrates performance, public encounters, and political agitation as powerful art forms. In her work, Ali enacts fantastic mythical heroines as assertions of feminist, queer, and alternative visibilities. These personas are hybrids of different religious aesthetics to disrupt ideas around otherness. Her performances are invitations for viewers to wander, witness, and joyfully experience moments that transcend the ordinary. Central to many of her performances is her use of textiles, a practice rooted in her Cham-Muslim refugee migration experience—her family fled Cambodia with only the clothes on their backs.

Hybrid Skin, Mythical Presence explores two of Ali’s iconic performances: The Buddhist Bug and The Red Chador. The colorful, transformative garments worn by the artist and others during the performances—which the artist considers “artifacts” rather than artworks when not enacted by her—are on view. Video, photography, and other installation art bring viewers into previous performances of the works from site-specific locations around the world. During the run of the exhibition, Ali will enact the works in two separate performances: The Buddhist Bug will be performed on March 23, 2024 and The Red Chador will be performed on June 1, 2024.