For Your Eyes Only
About the Project
LAND in partnership with OXY ARTS presents For Your Eyes Only (FYEO) by Yasmine Diaz. FYEO is the latest iteration of multidisciplinary artist Yasmine Nasser Diaz’s bedroom installation. The space contains signifiers familiar to SWANA* communities, but relatable to many adolescents of the diaspora. Against the graphic pink wallpaper, a two-channel video includes a projection of women and non-binary persons dancing in a reel of online selfie videos.
A second video montage of news clips featuring women-led political rallies from around the Global South plays on a 90’s-era television set. FYEO presents a layered constellation of interrelated realities, spanning borders, identities, and time, aligning along intersectional and transnational movements of solidarity.
The project intends to create a space to strengthen bonds between female and non-binary diasporic communities. By juxtaposing the diasporic dilemma alongside ongoing struggles for rights by women across the region and beyond, the FYEO installation generates complex yet hopeful connections rooted in possibilities for the future.
About the Artist
Yasmine Nasser Diaz is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice draws from nuanced, discordant, and evolving concepts of culture, class, gender, religion, and family. She uses mixed media collage, photo-based fiber etching, immersive installation, audio, and video to explore connections between personal experience and larger social and political structures. Born in the United States to parents who immigrated from the highlands of Southern Yemen, her youth was shaped by traversing the discordant environments of a tightly collectivist Yemeni diaspora, ‘90s inner-city Chicago, and Western society that prizes individualism and consumerism.
Diaz uses her work to navigate these experiences while exploring themes of gender and bicultural identity; family honor, shame and reputation. She sees her practice as a place of relevance for others, particularly those of the growing multicultural diasporas of the Global South who have migrated to areas of the Global North. Diaz is especially interested in complex narratives of third-culture identity, their precarious invisibility/hyper-visibility, and the friction often experienced between the individual and the collective.
Credits & Support
LAND’s 2023 exhibitions are made possible with lead support from the Offield Family Foundation, the Jerry and Terri Kohl Family Foundation, and The Perenchio Foundation. Additional support is provided by the Fran and Ray Stark Foundation, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors through the Department of Arts and Culture, the LA Arts Recovery Fund, Brenda Potter, the Wilhelm Family Foundation and LAND’s Nomadic Council. Special thanks to Artist Sponsors Karen Hillenburg, Liana Krupp, Abby Pucker, Ben Weyerhaeuser, and the Poncher Family Foundation.
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