EventsThe New Social Environment#656
Martha Atienza & Yee I-Lann: Silverlens New York
Featuring Atienza, I-Lann, and Jessamine Batario
Tuesday, September 27, 2022 1 p.m. Eastern / 10 a.m. Pacific
These free events are produced by The Brooklyn Rail.
Artists Martha Atienza and Yee I-Lann join Rail contributor Jessamine Batario for a conversation. We conclude with a poetry reading by KT Pe Benito.
In this Talk
Martha Atienza

Born to a Dutch mother and Filipino father, Martha Atienza (b. 1981, Manila, Philippines) has moved between the Netherlands and the Philippines throughout her life, which has had a profound influence on her focus as an artist. Atienza’s practice explores installation and video as a way of documenting and questioning issues around environment, community and development. Her work is mostly constructed in video, of an almost sociological nature, and tends to be collaborative. Atienza is a co-founder of the NGO GOODland: an organization that collaborates to create case-specific solutions that free land & oceans from harmful substances whilst enabling more eco-friendly means of living for the local islanders.
Yee I-Lann

Photomedia-based artist Yee I-Lann (b.1971, Kota Kinabalu) engages with archipelagic Southeast Asia’s turbulent history, addressing issues of colonialism and neo-colonialism, power, and the impact of historical memory in social experience. She employs a multi-layered visual vocabulary drawn from historical references, popular culture, archives, and everyday objects. She has recently started collaborating with sea-based and land-based communities and indigenous mediums in Sabah. She is a co-founding associate of The Ricecooker Archives: Southeast Asian Rock ’n’ Roll Treasury with her partner Joe Kidd, and has worked as a production designer in the Malaysian film industry. She is currently a Board member for Forever Sabah and Tamparuli Living Arts Center (TaLAC), both based in Sabah.
Jessamine Batario

Art historian Jessamine Batario specializes in modern and contemporary art. She received her PhD in Art History from The University of Texas at Austin. Batario currently lives in Waterville, Maine, where she is the Linde Family Foundation Curator of Academic Engagement at the Colby College Museum of Art. She was the guest critic for the Rail in March 2020.
Silverlens New York

Silverlens is an international gallery with locations in both Manila and New York, aiming to place its artists within the broader framework of the contemporary art dialogue. Its continuing efforts to transcend borders across art communities in Asia have earned it recognition as one of the leading contemporary art galleries in Southeast Asia. Silverlens was founded in Manila by Isa Lorenzo in 2004, and in 2007 she was joined by co-director Rachel Rillo. In September 2022, the gallery opened its doors in the Chelsea neighborhood of New York, broadening its international scope and bringing its diverse roster of artists to a new global audience.
The Rail has a tradition of ending our conversations with a poetry reading, and we're fortunate to have Dao Strom reading.
Dao Strom

Artist Dao Strom works with three “voices”—written, sung, visual—to explore hybridity and the intersection of personal and collective histories. She is the author of Instrument (Fonograf Editions, 2020) and its musical companion Traveler’s Ode (Antiquated Future Records, 2020); a bilingual poetry-art book, You Will Always Be Someone From Somewhere Else (AJAR Press); a memoir, We Were Meant To Be a Gentle People, and song cycle, East/West; and two books of fiction, The Gentle Order of Girls and Boys and Grass Roof, Tin Roof. Born in Vietnam, Strom grew up in the Sierra Nevada foothills of California and lives in Portland, Oregon. She is co-founder of two collective art projects, She Who Has No Master(s), and De-Canon.
We’d like to thank The Marion Boulton Kippy Stroud Foundation and Teiger Foundation for making these conversations possible, and for their support of our growing archive 🌈✨