An Interview with Bianca Nozaki-Nasser
with ZEina Baltagi
Zeina Baltagi: When did you realize that you were an artist?
Bianca Nozaki-Nasser: So what's interesting is I've always grown up doing art, but I never thought about being a professional artist. I've worked in creative for a long time. but when you're working from survival mode towards having some stability in your life, you aren't really thinking about, or at least I wasn't really thinking about, developing my voice as an artist. So my art has been kept pretty private, at least my personal practice, for a lot of my life. I've done more commercial design work but this show was the first time I came out to everybody as an artist, a real capital “A” artist with a public arts practice.
BNN: Art is a way of processing things that I'm struggling with or expressing where I’m at. Indigenous folks believe in the principle of embodied knowledge and language. Writing is not always the best way or tool to communicate or learn from or internalize ways of knowing. So for me, creating art, whether or not anyone sees my art for the rest of my life, it's something I'll have to continue to do. For me, it's a way of knowing and a language for processing, kind of like how some people journal.
ZB: I can relate to that because art's totally therapy for me too. It helps me process through my own life experiences and that's really what I'm gaining out of. It is not the product in the end. And that's why that kind of work is the hardest to market and doesn’t really fit into any kind of art market or even often in academic conversations. But it is the most important work to make. I think that's when I find people that will relate in a really deep, profound way and it'll make that art for people, rather than art for the market, for an institution.
BNN: Totally. During the process of the residency, I really came up against this idea of the fact that in graduate school, I needed permission to work. My therapist was like, “Do you think white men sit around and wait for someone to give them permission to do something?” And I was like, “Oh, no.” She was like, “Who are you waiting for? Why do you think you need permission from someone to do this?” That was really a liberating point in the year – trying to or moving towards the work was just like, “Oh, I don't need permission to start working through this, even if I don't reach anybody else.”
ZB: I would love to hear your experience as someone that's biracial within the Arab diaspora. There is so much racism, colorism and Arab supremacy within the culture. So this is a very sensitive question, but what have you encountered as an adult?
“ I am so glad that I'm queer and in California and landed in the place where I am”
BNN: Arab communities are known to be incredibly anti-Black. In Lebanon they still have the Kafala [a legal framework that has for decades defined the relationship between migrant workers and their employers in Jordan, Lebanon, and all Arab Gulf states but Iraq] system. I work at 18 Million Rising and some of the work we do in the Asian-American movement involves confronting anti-Blackness in our communities.
Growing up multiracial, especially when you have monoracial parents or parents who present as monoracial, you don't even have affirming experiences within your own family. In addition to those overt racial attitudes, there were those confusing things, like what Cathy Park Hong talks about in Minor Feelings - like my auntie telling me “ you’re smart because you're a girl and because you're Asian.”
But, there’s this trope for mixed kids growing up like, “Oh, I don't fit in anywhere.” I’m interested in complicating that - so I did my whole master's thesis around how the material and physical ways we form racial identity. Starting with thinking about the way we are taught to talk to each other, the way parents talk to their kids, the way I talk about myself.
At a certain point in my early twenties, I gave myself permission to be who I am. Most people either want to put you into “you're Arab” or “you're Asian.” I don't use percentages like “half or quarter” because it's language rooted in white supremacy. Kim Tall Bear’s work explains how blood quantum has been a tool used in the genocide of native peoples. But all of that is to say, to be honest at times it's been lonely or complicated and sometimes it’s not, but I am so glad that I'm queer and in California and landed in the place where I am and get to figure it all out.
In Lebanon some people read me as Asian, some people didn't. I also don't speak Arabic. During that trip I met Dayna Ash who's in my piece, the video piece, Star Gayzing. I was in Beirut alone and I had just left my family in Baalbek. I stopped by Haven for Artists, this queer feminist art space Dayna founded. I met a bunch of queers there and they showed me around Beirut. We made dinner together and went out. While working with Dayna for Star Gayzing, I told her that if I didn’t meet her, if arts and culture spaces weren't there, places like Haven, I don't know if I would be interrogating and pursuing a relationship with my identity like I am now. Like, I’m not out to my family, and in general there are pieces of me that I originally felt like I couldn’t bring with me. Seeing young artists, young queers, in Lebanon confronting things like transphobia and anti-Blackness, that are so often we are told are just “part of our culture” was a big moment of possibility and belonging for me.
ZB: Totally makes sense. Generationally there's a huge shift in Lebanon within the discourse and it is just shifting. I'm happy that you had that experience.
BNN: Thank you. Yeah, so when I made the textile pieces I wanted to play with materiality. They’re the pieces that I'm most proud of in relation to my previous work around complicating mixed race studies. My written thesis research touches on mixed race studies celebration of photography projects that visually recreate the material language of eugenics. I'm really interested in expanding the visual language and materiality used to talk about multiracial realities, that stretches beyond your passing relationship to whiteness or what features you get or how light or dark your skin is. While it is important to continue discussing the dangers and privileges of passing, there's also a whole breadth of work that could engage with generations of attitudes and choices around power and navigating those complexities.
BNN: So Beth Coleman has this piece called “Race As Technology”. I love it because it talks about race from a material standpoint, as a piece of technology, a tool that we use. She addresses the insidiousness of whiteness and how whiteness is malleable on purpose.
So in the piece, putting these three rugs next to each other: I'm a fifth generation Japanese American and chose to feature executive order 9066, the call for Japanese incarceration, to name the reverberation of the experience in my family. The second rug’s document is from NSEERs [National Security Entry-Exit Registration System] post 9/11. My uncle, who recently passed away, who had helped raise me since I was four, was one of the 80,000 men and boys targeted by the program and was eventually pushed out of the country. Then the third rug features the report cover from the leaked Black identity extremist FBI report from a few years ago that connects to the history of COINTELPRO, these government tactics that are used to justify the surveillance and criminalization of Black people and other people of color fighting for dignity.
My hope in putting these three things together is not to imply that these experiences are the same, but to an attempt to grasp at the roots, and note that they all are grappling with these systems of power. History continues to try and separate these histories but they’re actually incredibly rooted with one another. People are struggling and affected by the same conditions created by these systems, but the expression, the experiences are different. I can't sit here and say a Black American's experience is similar to an Arab-American experience, but they both experience violence that comes from state surveillance.
ZB: It’s really nice thinking about how our position to power changes depending on where we're coming from or where we're talking about it. We could talk about Palestine through the lens of the Middle East but it is drastically different from our experience of being Arab here. So kind of shifting the context of how hard we fight for Palestine is just as how hard we should fight for Black and Indigenous folks here. If we want to free Palestine, then we need to care about the Indigenous folks here. I think because we are here, so it's, there's a more direct action to the land that we are sitting on. I think it's really important that I go back to that personally because it's easy for us to talk about oppression that's far away because it actually harms us less versus what is happening on our doorstep.
ZB: It's interesting taking these documents and then placing them on the prayer rugs and then elevating the prayer rug so that it's now visible upright versus looking down on it.
“You're time traveling!”
BNN: Yeah, originally I wanted them to be on the floor and I was going to do a projection piece with them. I actually do like them being upright because it demands a little bit more attention as in the way you would read a document rather than the way that you would pray on the ground. And then putting them in prayer rugs. I was doing some research around time and thinking about radial ways of thinking about time rather than linear. And I am in year seven of CPTSD healing work and something I was thinking a lot about while I was making all of this work is: how do I share how time is experienced in our own bodies?
Meditation and prayer is a moment where I feel time kind of collapses. Where you're thinking about the future, but you're very in the present and you're also bringing in that embodied spiritual knowledge of either your relationship to self, to land, or ancestors. I chose rugs initially because while I was reflecting, one of the only times I saw my dad be a visibly Muslim while growing up in Orange County was seeing him praying at home, on bath towels. The materiality of a prayer rug is layered for me both personally, spiritually in relationship to the things I'm trying to talk about.
ZB: It's really tactile which is really nice in opposition to your video work.
BNN: I don't want to put myself in a box with being a collage artist, but what I'm noticing is I really love texture and sometimes that's visual, tactile, or an audio texture. In the projection work when you sit with the headphones, I ended up layering video I took - the river where my dad used to play, my auntie playing in my Teta’s garden - and just leaving all the different sounds on top of one another. I didn't touch them at all. The only thing I did was I recorded a breath track over it and that kind of texture just, I love it.
ZB: It's cool because texture, when it comes to touch, smell and even audio is so tied to memory. A deep ingrained part of memory is really thinking about the feel of something around you. To put that in the work and add those small elements seems like really powerful markers for yourself. They're grounding moments that others could ground themselves within as well. It’s like you're bouncing through time a little bit.
BNN: Yeah. Oh my God, thank you for saying that! That's totally what I'm going for. I'm so glad you got that.
ZB: You're time traveling!
BNN: When I was trying to explain what I needed from people, asking for support around CTPSD, I would try to explain that, it feels like I'm time traveling. It feels like I'm in two different places at once. Mainstream media has taught people to think of flashbacks like movies replaying in your head. But, in sensorial, it is invasive remembering of smells, sights, touch… I just feel so seen right now. Thank you for getting that!
ZB: Absolutely. It's totally just a different way of receiving. But thank you so much for sharing so much of yourself!
BNN: Yeah. Thank you so much for coordinating with me, giving me your time and your attention, and also just sharing yourself with me. I’m happy that we started here and I can't wait to just grow a relationship with you!
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