While Cambodia, the United States and France share a violent past—colonial repression, war, bombing campaigns, genocide, migrations of refugees, deportations, and forced ‘repatriations’—this multi-media exhibition explores another set of parallel histories in which alternate futures were (and are) written, proposed and even determined. Featuring visual art, photography, music, performance, sculpture, installation, and text, it reveals the ways in which people imagine and generate futures in contexts most often represented as ones of crisis, disaster, and victimhood.

For example, documents and video demonstrate the outcome of years of U.S. inflicted violence in Southeast Asia that imposes a future in which Cambodian refugees settle in the United States and France where they forge new identities and ways of belonging. Thirty-five years later, Cambodian-Americans, forcibly “repatriated” by the U.S. to Cambodia, reflect on and demand a relationship to their “home” country—the U.S.— through hip hop and spoken word.

Curated by an interdisciplinary group of students from across The New School, the exhibition is the outcome of an experimental workshop that brought together ethnographic and curatorial methodologies, including 10 months of research in New York with brief fieldwork in Phnom Penh and Paris. It will travel to the Parsons Paris Gallery in April 2016 and is expected to go to Phnom Penh as well.

The exhibition features work by Binh Danh, Genealogy of Bassac Group/Pen Sereypagna, The Cambodian Space Project, Chath Piersath, Eng Rithchandaneth, Charles Fox, Stuart Isett, Klap Ya Handz/Sok “Cream” Visal, Komlang Khmer, Dave Kyu, Roland Neveu, Michelle Nugent, Peuo Tuy, Pete Pin, Monica Sok, Studio Revolt/Anida Yoeu Ali, and Yim Maline.

Curators: Laura Belik (Parsons School of Design ’16), Elise Gerspach (New School for Social Research ’15), Andrea Gil (Eugene Lang College ’15), Quizayra Gonzalez (Parsons School of Design ’16), and Veija Kusama-Morris (Eugene Lang College ’16)

Faculty Directors: Jaskiran Dhillon, Radhika Subramaniam, and Miriam Ticktin.

This exhibition and workshop was made possible with the generous support of the Provost’s Office Innovations in Education Grant; MA Design Studies, a graduate program of the School of Art and Design History and Theory, Parsons; Parsons Cross-School Funds; the Student Life and Outreach Committee, Lang; and the University Student Senate. Additional support was provided by Global Studies, School for Public Engagement and the New School for Social Research Dean’s Office.