(May 10, 2023 – Los Angeles, CA) – OXY ARTS and LAND (Los Angeles Nomadic Division) are pleased to announce for the sake of dancing in the street, a group exhibition featuring works by LASTESIS, Morehshin Allahyari, Yasmine Nasser Diaz, in conversation with works by Ava Ansari, Entangled Roots Press, Geochicas, and an archival display created by Caitlin Abadir Mullay and Raja Bella Hicks. The exhibition and associated programming were conceived and organized in collaboration with OXY ARTS, LAND (Los Angeles Nomadic Division), and artist Yasmine Nasser Diaz.

Collectively, the work documents and amplifies individual acts of resistance as well as historical and ongoing global feminist and queer protest movements, including the current uprisings in Iran. Movements that use movement as a liberatory practice emerge as a through-line, highlighting the tension between public and private space and the inseparability of individual battles for personal freedoms from collective struggles for justice and bodily autonomy. These actions use disruption, joy and irreverence as critical tactics, along the way reclaiming sensuality and questioning the limits of cultural approval.

Central to the exhibition is Yasmine Nasser Diaz’s For Your Eyes Only (FYEO), an installation that invites visitors into an intimate bedroom adorned with a disco ball, a pink neon “evil eye,” and protest gear: protective eye goggles, a megaphone, a small first aid kit, a water bottle, sanitizer and an ACLU pocket “know your rights” booklet. On a TV and projected onto the patterned wall are videos of women and non-binary individuals dancing—documenting real histories of individual and collective protest through demonstration and dance. A live CCTV feed of the installation is viewable from street facing windows, allowing passersby to peer in. The tension between public and private, the fine line between bearing witness and voyeurism (especially through the use of social media), and questions about the limits of individual action ripple throughout the exhibition.

In the videos, we see moments where Un violador en tu camino is being performed. The demonstration first took place in Valparaíso Chile in November 2019, organized by the feminist collective LASTESIS, and has since been performed all over the world and translated into 22 languages. After the original performance, LASTESIS shared the script to their performance widely and made it accessible for other organizers to use. The exhibition features a video compilation by LASTESIS of footage they received from other activists and organizers across the globe who performed Un violador en tu camino in support of their own protest movements. The performance refracts throughout the exhibition through documentation and archival material compiled by Caitlin Abadir-Mullally and Raja Bella Hicks that highlight specific cities where Un violador was performed; offering context about the lineages and influences of specific historical moments, and drawing connections between contemporary movements around the world.

This mix of documentation, archival and commissioned materials trace connections and inspire new reverberating calls to action. Included in the archival collection are a series of posters created by Ali Cat of Entangled Roots Press in solidarity with feminist resistance movements in the SWANA region and beyond. Entangled Roots Press is contributing an original print commissioned on the occasion of the exhibition. Takeaway copies will be available for visitors, with a suggested donation to support contemporary feminist and queer organizations and activists, along with an additional takeaway print of the lyrics and choreography of Un violador.

The title of the exhibition comes from a line in Shervin Hadjipour’s song Baraye, composed during the ongoing feminist uprising/revolution in Iran following the killing of Jina “Mahsa” Amini on September 16, 2022. Morehshin Allahyari’s augmented reality artwork Zoba’ah: The Whirlwind, prompts visitors to consider their own relationship to the current movement. The AR artwork is available to download after engaging with a series of “terms and conditions” where you publicly post a personal series of small daily actions to create bigger collective goals and changes in the world. Explaining the importance of the actions to this piece, Allahyari writes:

“When we say change is a daily practice, what do we mean by it? Can everyday purposeful actions result in collective major changes?...These thoughts and questions have been the center of my practice for many years but in the past 7 weeks, I’ve been able to truly witness their power through the #woman_life_freedom revolution in Iran. There is a sentence that has been passed around among Iranians: “Wherever you are standing, come one step closer”. Meaning not everyone has to be on the frontline of fight for freedom for it to matter. Every small step forward matters.”

Public programming during the exhibition season centers dance and the body. For the opening reception, TCS—a local movement collective—will perform an original dance developed with Yasmine Nasser Diaz that engages her installation both physically and conceptually. The performance is set to a soundtrack composed by Carol Abi Ghanem. Later in the summer, dancer Esraa Warda will lead a Raï workshop and performance. Raï is a popular, grass-roots music of West Algeria associated with social protest—it challenges the religious, the colonial, the social, and the acceptable status quo and has been historically disenfranchised by colonialists and the local Algerian nation-state. Despite its marginalization, it has been a symbol of soulfulness, freedom, and groove. Participants will learn rai "groove" through rhythmic and fundamental footwork, inviting them to literally embody this space where joyful movement and protest intertwine.

Following OXY ARTS’ artist-centered residency model, this exhibition was an opportunity for Nasser Diaz to engage in expansive experimentation and allow for emergent themes to develop in conversation with other artists and collaborators. LAND and Nasser Diaz had been in discussion about staging FYEO in Los Angeles; expanding the partnership with OXY ARTS allows for the project to include additional artist’s works, commissioned performances, and a research / archival project documenting histories of global actions related to the exhibition, overseen by Nasser Diaz. She writes, “the scale allowed us to bring in additional artists, performers, and activists whose work is in dialogue with FYEO, several of whom were already a part of that work when it was first presented in 2021…It has been an immense pleasure to help bring in these and other collaborators into this exhibition, whose work has informed and inspired my own in their expressions of transnational feminist solidarity.”

for the sake of dancing in the street invites us to witness and wonder what is possible when bodies that have been subject to control transform themselves into tools of resistance and empowerment. Although these artists’ works emerge from varied geographical and cultural contexts, the layers of their influence reverberate across time and space. Histories, chants, and safety tactics are shared through zines, online, through apps, through whispers and shouts. Their shared goals of liberation, bodily autonomy, and reframing oppressive histories and structures, form an intertwining constellation and create new lineages of possibility.