Betty Yu: (Dis)Placed in Sunset Park
September 6-29 2018
Opening Reception: Thursday, September 6, 7-9pm
Artist Talk: September 20, 6-8pm
Placekeeping Walk: September 22, 3pm (RSVP here)
Panel Discussion, Disrupting Gentrification in Sunset Park: September 29, 3-5pm
Betty Yu presents (Dis)Placed in Sunset Park, a multimedia project at Open Source Gallery.
New York City has experienced accelerated gentrification in the last fifteen years, with working class and immigrant communities being displaced and uprooted from their homes and communities. Brooklyn’s Sunset Park is one of the many diverse communities that is rapidly changing and being homogenized by waves of gentrification. (Dis)Placed in Sunset Park is an interactive multimedia project that features Sunset Park residents drawing on people’s recollection of the past as they live in the present and articulate their hopes for the future of the neighborhood. The common theme among their stories is the shared narrative of migration to the U.S., their journey to Sunset Park and the fear of displacement as a result of gentrification.
Through augmented reality, an interactive map, and short videos, (Dis)Placed in Sunset Park provides a platform for everyday people who are directly impacted by immigration and gentrification in the neighborhood to have an outlet to express what Sunset Park means to them and what their hopes are for the future of the community. Each story–featuring mainly Latino and Chinese residents–is grounded in the subject’s own sense of home, sanctuary and refuge that they have found in their neighborhood. In Sunset Park, the Latino community is being hit hard by the massive gentrification caused by the multi-million dollar Industry City development, a former shipping industry that employed thousands of U.S. born and immigrant workers that has been rebranded in recent years as an industrial waterfront for the “maker” innovation economy centered on art, high fashion, design, film and TV, tech startups, and specialized food sectors. In Sunset Park’s Chinatown, big money from overseas banks in China, real estate developers and even domestic investors are buying up residential and business properties and converting them into luxury condos, shopping centers, a tourist gateway and other business ventures meant not for working class residents, but for the wealthy. Many are displaced, and those that stay are subjected to rising rents and crowded single room occupancies (SRO) where weak tenant housing laws favor landlords.
Betty Yu is a Chinese-American multimedia artist, filmmaker educator and community activist. She received her BFA from NYU Tisch School of the Arts and her MFA in Integrated Media Arts from Hunter College. She is a co-founder of the Chinatown Art Brigade, a cultural collective telling stories of Chinatown tenants fighting gentrification through public projections and art. Her work has been exhibited and featured at the Margaret Mead Film and Video Festival, Tribeca Film Institute’s Interactive, International Center of Photography, Directors Guild of America, Eastman Kodak Museum, Museum of Modern Art and the Brooklyn Museum among many others. Yu has been been awarded residencies and fellowships at A Blade of Grass, Laundromat Project, International Studio and Curatorial Program, Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts and the Intercultural Leadership Institute.
Betty Yu: (Dis)Placed in Sunset Park | Press Release | Panel Discussion: Disrupting Gentrification in Sunset Park | Artist Talk | Placekeeping Walk | On Sinovision
