Where Is Your Body?
An interview with artist and curator Delaney Chieyen Holton
Delaney Chieyen Holton (Del, they/them) is a writer, curator, and film programmer based in the Bay Area, with roots in Texas and Mississippi. They are currently completing a PhD in Art History at Stanford University, where they write on Asian American memory practices and queer archival politics.
Del is the curator of “Where Is Your Body,” an arts exhibition that explores questions of labor, memory, and desire through practices of the body. The exhibition highlights the body and its needs as the lowest common denominator for solidarity. Thinking of the body – in its capacities and vulnerabilities – as a site of both violence and resistance, the exhibition gathers women/trans/queer artists of API diasporic experience engaged in practices of the body to explore questions of labor, memory, and desire.
Exhibiting artists include:
Nibha Akireddy, Erina Alejo, Sholeh Asgary, Bhasha Chakrabarti, Edi Dai, Ruka Kashiwagi, Private Practices Collection (via Kayla Tange and Hailey Loman), Thuong Hoai Tran, Kim Ye, Rachel Youn and Learning Palestine.
Visit the exhibition in person at SOMArts Cultural Center (934 Brannan St, San Francisco, CA) between April 26th - May 24, 2024 or browse the Virtual Gallery online!
Sign up for the special exhibition program “soft alchemy” presented by Kelsey Chen on May 18, 2024. RSVP Required! Experience a tea service, tattooing performance, and guided movement practice in an open space of meeting. soft alchemy invites you into communion with the closest planets of our bodies; to feel the gravitational conversations between; and, through the gentlest of practices, to seep through and with the people, art, and space of the gallery. Chris Giang will offer tea service from handmade ceramics during the event.
“Where Is Your Body,” is the Featured Visual Art Exhibition of the 27th Annual United States of Asian America Festival: Be(long)ing Here, presented by the Asian Pacific Islander Cultural Center. The festival runs through May and June for Asian American, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander Heritage Month! Check out our full festival programming and get tickets for events on our website.
APICC: Hi Delaney, thanks for talking story with Shift the Script! Can you start off by sharing how the idea for “Where is Your Body" began? What motivated you to curate this exhibition and why now?
DELANEY CHIEYEN HOLTON: The idea for Where Is Your Body was seeded from a convergence between discussions that I was having with Hailey Loman, Director of the Los Angeles Contemporary Archive (LACA), and Kayla Tange, organizer of the AAPI Artist and Sex Worker Collection. The discussions were about the Private Practices collection of AAPI artists and sex workers’ materials at the LACA, as well as writing I was doing on Thuong Hoai Tran’s and Edi Dai’s respective weaving work, about duration and embodiment in fiber practices. Across all of this work, I was seeing resonances of gendered labor, but also affects stirred up in the tenderness, immediacy, and intimacy of touch.
A few months passed, and I underwent a bodily transformation of my own, getting a gender affirming surgery that required me to spend a lot of time literally tending to my wounds and asking for help from others to do so.
These matters of art, archives, and bodily experience can seem random and disparate… Though, at some point, they cohered into a meditation on vulnerability and interdependency. The needs of our bodies dictate so much of how we use our time and energy and, how we connect or don’t connect with the world.
The needs of our bodies dictate so much of how we use our time and energy and, how we connect or don’t connect with the world.
Bodies are also subject to the political and economic forces that structure our lives, through the ways we are variously racialized or gendered, debilitated by unaccommodating environments, subjected to capitalistic forms of labor, and so on. I found myself – and still find myself – unable to coherently articulate this swirling amalgam of experiences and relations sited in the body. So I looked to artists’ approaches to these questions.
I think artists have an ability to bring many interlocking relations and images into suspension together to give experiential form to something that eludes the logic of writing – maybe something about the wisdom of sensory experience? So, this exhibition was conceptualized as a space to work out these questions in real time, in a shared space with others.
APICC: How did curating and producing this exhibition transform you personally? How did your see your internal or external world shift through this process?
DELANEY CHIEYEN HOLTON: Organizing the exhibition made me realize how unpracticed I was at producing events. As a researcher/writer, I spend a lot of time writing, teaching, and otherwise working with ideas. But, making an exhibition is an entirely different kind of project that requires more attention to physicality, material, and logistics. It’s something I’ve learned on the fly.
Since this is the first curatorial project I’ve led, and as a community event part of the 2024 United States of Asian America Festival, my team had a much shorter planning timeline than what I’ve experienced in museums.
Working with such a wonderful team of artists, administrators, preparators, and more, especially towards a project so near to my heart that feels meaningful for our communities, has brought me a certain confidence, a sense of efficacy that we really can make things happen through coordinated, and collective efforts.
An exhibition is interactive, collaborative, and dialogic in process. As an extension of that, an opportunity for connecting and sharing ideas. The exhibition has also populated my life with so many cosmic encounters and generative conversations about the themes of the show. It gives me the feeling of being entangled in a vast web of shared interests and commitments, like we’re all trying to build the same future in our own ways.
APICC: What lessons have you learned from this process that you still carry with you today?
DELANEY CHIEYEN HOLTON: I learn so much from the artists’ work… Cultural history stuff – like getting exposed to the mega popular song Diem Xua through Ruka Kashiwagi’s Tracings of my Grandmother – or reflections on community organizing in the Bay from folks like Erina Alejo, who have grown up and spent years building relationships here. I also had to learn things like how to hang ten-foot weavings from the ceiling. The practical, material knowledge about how to materialize things spatially is something I keep returning to and finding a lot of meaning in.
I’m reminded of how grounding it can be to make things with one’s hands, and to have a tangible outcome of one’s work, especially for those of us whose day-to-day labor is so abstracted.
APICC: What do you recommend to another person who wants to curate an exhibition like this?
DELANEY CHIEYEN HOLTON: A wish for everyone, and also for myself, is to just make stuff or throw events with your friends! I think it can be hard to access opportunities, to put on a whole exhibition in a gallery or get grants to make the work you’re conceptualizing or doing things of that scale. But, I think there’s room to be flexible and creative with problem solving through our challenges and rethinking the scale and scope of our projects or events. What are we actually trying to do with these efforts, and how do we get there, right?
A little film screening for 6 people, or a showing of your friends’ work in your apartment can be enough to cultivate community relationships and start the conversations we want to be having.
Of course, I want folks from our communities to get the platform they deserve! I know a lot of people have goals to work in large, institutionally legible ways. But, I also want to hold on to our ability to make stuff happen for ourselves, together!
APICC: Do you have a song, poem, or book that reminds you of this experience that you’d like to share with us?
Of course, Mari Matsuda’s Where is Your Body, which the exhibition takes its title from. But also, Prageeta Sharma’s Grateful and Hua Xi’s Heaven have maintained a persistent presence in my mind for the past months. Maybe less direct of an influence, but I think they’ve shaped the emotional contours of the show in some way.
We hope that you’ll take friends and family see this powerful exhibition at SOMArts Cultural Center (934 Brannan St, San Francisco, CA) between April 26th - May 24, 2024 or browse the Virtual Gallery online.
The 27th Annual United States of Asian America Festival: Be(long)ing Here presented by API Cultural Center presents up to 20 different programs reflecting the artistic accomplishments and cultural diversity of San Francisco’s Pacific Islander and Asian American communities. Check out our website for the full festival calendar!
