RTS is excited to host Real Talks with resident artists Leena Joshi and Ahn Lee Wednesday, November 9th from 6-8pm PST.
Real Talks will be held at RTS, located at 125 10th St. Oakland. We are excited to have this event back in person again!!!! We do ask everyone to wear a mask indoors, and there will be hand sanitizer available.
Leena Joshi is an artist, poet, and educator working across sculpture, video, performance, and text. Their work considers experiences of desire, illness, and the labor of appearance for queer, racialized, and trans people, often engaging the digital and speculative as spaces to explore a shifting, illegible, and expansive definition of personhood. Joshi’s work is curious about new forms and practices in an embrace of amateurism and play. Leena’s poetry and written work can be found in SFMoMA’s Open Space, baest: a journal of queer forms and affects, and Berkeley Poetry Review, among others. They work as the Digital Media Arts Instructor at Creative Growth Art Center in Oakland, California.
Ahn Lee is a nonbinary (they/she), queer Cantonese artist and researcher. Their interdisciplinary practice of ceramics, research and performance relies on a combined methodology of autobiographical re-making and research on the Cantonese diaspora. As a person of Sunwui (Xinhui) descent, Ahn explores their ancestral roots to this contested site of capitalism and imperialism through leveraging archival research historiography, critical race and gender theory.Ahn received their MFA in May 2022 from UC Berkeley’s Art Practice Department, where they were the 2021 Jack K. and Gertrude Murphy Awardee. Ahn previously studied in UCLA’s Gender Studies Department as a Eugene V. Cota Robles Graduate Fellow before leaving the program to pursue art full time. Their work has been shown at SOMArts, Root Division, The SF International Asian American Film Festival (CAAMFEST), TranScreen Amsterdam Transgender Film Festival, and as an Emerging Artist with Disabilities Grant recipient and a Creative Capital Artist Training Grant recipient at The Kennedy Center. In 2022, Ahn received the Simone V. Leigh Zenobia Award for the Watershed Ceramics Residency. Ahn is currently a 2022-23 Graduate Student Fellow at the Headlands Center for the Arts and a resident at Real Time and Space, Oakland.