Professor Millie Chen exhibits at Hallwalls

[From the Hallwalls SRS (Silk Road Songbook) exhbition page:]

In the multi-screen project SRS (Silk Road Songbook), Millie Chen and Arzu Ozkal weave together images and sound in such a way that the evocation of the limitless sense of possibility persistently presents itself. Videos depicting open (though not barren) landscapes from Istanbul, Tehran, Tashkent, Bishkek, and Xi'an are presented with accompanying songs specific to the location along the historical "Silk Road." That road and its historical relevance have typically been framed from Western perspectives: a trade route brought about by Europeans' fascination with distant lands—their spices, their fabrics, their exotic otherness. The work counters the conventional narrative of these trade routes and the Eurocentric presumptions around them.

While the work is not explicitly about immigration as we know it today, it does direct attention to the reality that a Silk Road, or any other trade route, is the culmination of extensive migration. Refugees, women, families, and souls filled with wanderlust created not a single road but a network of interlaced routes, creating a perpetual intersection of dreams, desires, and aspirations. There is daring in this, but also trepidation, danger and a world of unknowns. These uncertainties play out across a brilliantly expansive landscape, filmed with such quiet elegance in locations that are still lightly developed. It suffuses the work with a timeless sensation—we know these images are contemporary but they sometimes feel as though they were retrieved from some ancient, collective memory.

Each video features the performance of a song by collaborators from the local community. These songs lift and highlight women's voices as the driving force of the location and its migratory impulses. The land—which, in some cases, appears untouched from a thousand years ago—visually grounds the work between its five projections and reiterates the geographic context from which these songs emerge. The participating musicians chose both the music and the landscape upon which to perform. Chen and Ozkal serve as the artist-ethnographers whose task is both to lift these voices and stories—some of which directly connects to the artists' own familial heritages—and create an atmospheric space that leads the viewer across eons of the past and potentially toward a more cognizant future.

With its direct allusions to crossing vast lands to its specificity of song choices, SRS seeks to widen an established narrative and reveal the texture of hundreds of overlapping narratives within the whole. While SRS deals with five locations, the suggestions brought about by the work are not exclusive to the Silk Road. These are but a few select versions of the limitless immigrant narratives that defined not only the Silk Road but every other place that sustained such persistent and ongoing human activity.

SRS also upends our presumptions of superiority over ancient peoples—technologically advanced we may be, but these ancient trade routes defined by human legs, animal tracks, and carts are the same paths used today to transport electronics, fuel, and nation-building projects. In this respect, the work reminds us that all of our present efforts are reverberations from a deeper well of history that is expressed here by songs of mourning, dissent, fortitude, and joy. There is no easy path, then or now, and the culmination of all journeys is hard won. Then and now.

Sound Producer: Jean Martin

Video Editor: Chris Ferrari
Technology Designer: Sangjun Yoo 

Publisher: Yasmeen Siddiqui (Minerva Projects)