What does it mean to be a refugee? An L.A. artist examines her family’s history of displacement and loss

When Jenny Yurshansky’s mother and father fled Soviet-era Moldova in 1978, they may take solely a handful of things with them — what would match, primarily, into two small suitcases. No valuables had been allowed, solely necessities for survival; they may carry lower than $300 money and no documentation of training.

Michael and Rima Yurshansky stuffed clothes and blankets into their luggage. Rima packed an embroidered toddler’s hat and an alphabet child e-book for her soon-to-be born daughter, Jenny. Yurshansky was born in Rome months later in January 1979, and her mother and father — asylum seekers on the time, ready for permission to achieve entry into the U.S. — finally settled in Northridge. The objects they’d carted from Japanese Europe turned an integral a part of their new house in California.

Now these gadgets have knowledgeable an exhibition centering household migration and the inherited trauma of exile, a well timed subject as greater than 2.5 million Ukrainians have fled the nation in current weeks since Russia’s invasion. Yurshansky joins a legacy of artists who’ve probed themes of displacement, trauma and loss entwined with the worldwide refugee disaster, together with photographer Tom Kiefer, who saved and photographed migrant and asylum seekers’ belongings discarded after they crossed the U.S.-Mexico border, and Chinese language artist and human rights activist Ai Weiwei, whose many artwork and media initiatives middle on the plight of refugees, freedom of expression and life in exile.

Yurshansky’s solo exhibition, “A Legacy of Loss: There Have been No Roses There,” on view at American Jewish College via Could 12, consists of 5 sculptural installations, a multimedia piece and an audio tour. The titular “There Have been No Roses There (Diaspora)” — a climbing rose vine made from welded metal that was charred in a kiln and which options glass roses with brass thorns — traces three generations of her household’s migration to both Argentina, Germany, Israel or the U.S. during the last 100 years. It’s additionally a file of members of the family killed in World Battle II.

Yurshansky, who now lives within the Lincoln Heights space of Los Angeles, stated she was impressed to create the exhibition after journeys again to Moldova together with her mom in 2016 and 2017.

“I’d gotten an artist grant from Asylum Arts to take my mother again to Moldova for the primary time since fleeing,” Yurshansky says. “I wished to discover this theme of what it means to be a refugee, learning my circle of relatives as a case examine.”

The exhibition’s via traces are common, Yurshansky says. “To desert one’s house and depart every part behind and are available someplace totally unknown, this brings generational trauma,” she explains on this edited dialog. “I believe there’s quite a lot of denial within the U.S. as a result of there’s this fable of Americanness, that our pasts have been erased and our slates cleaned. That we belong on this area whereas others don’t. Mixed with the truth that our households don’t need to speak about it, it’s too painful. The exhibition is supposed to supply a spot to have open discussions about this difficult actuality.”

Your present is particularly well timed. Do you consider the exhibition in a different way now?

The collection “The Border Will Not Maintain,” framed embroideries, has taken on a brand new dimension in mild of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The embroideries handle how the concepts of nationalism, bigotry and us-versus-them propaganda are weaponized by states, pitting populations towards each other. It’s a sample that we all know very properly right here within the U.S. and, after all, occurs worldwide. Russia resuming its place on the middle of this sample is simply one other inevitable flip of historical past.

These items — every a Moldovan folks embroidery sample collaged with Soviet-era imagery taken from Cyrillic alphabet primers — discover how systemic suppression, oppression and revisionist propaganda could be masked in charming shows of folks traditions and supplies. The books are crammed with Soviet propaganda and, together with the alphabet, they’re embedded with jingoistic concepts, notions of who belongs, help of the militarized state and the way to be a “good Soviet.” The people embroidery patterns whereas lovely have a a lot darker aspect to them. The shadows solid by the fragile embroidery work on the floor of the silk chiffon is a reminder to be cautious of each the benign and overt methods through which the specter of nationalism is represented.

“The Border Will Not Maintain,” conventional Moldovan embroidery patterns mixed with child e-book imagery, with shadows projected on the wall.

(From Jenny Yurshansky)

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How did you expertise the inherited trauma of your mother and father’ refugee expertise?

The interval through which my mom turned pregnant with me was extraordinarily demanding. As a result of my mom and father sought to depart the Soviet Union as refugees, they misplaced their jobs and the ready interval might simply take a yr. Her physician suggested her to solely achieve 15 kilos as a result of there have been no epidurals utilized in the us. She actually carried me inside her over borders from the Soviet Union, enduring an pointless and botched C-section in an Italian hospital as a result of there was nobody to advocate for her. Added to that stress, none of my grandparents wished to affix my mother and father in making an attempt to hunt asylum within the U.S. All of them immigrated to Israel as a substitute, which was extraordinarily distressing to my mom who was extremely near her mother and father. I used to be born stateless in Rome whereas they waited.

The extreme stress my mom skilled resulted in bodily and psychological traits of mine which might be an imprint of my mom’s trauma. I’ve scoliosis — which doesn’t run in my household — which required spinal fusion surgical procedure. I’m considerably shorter and smaller than the remainder of my household, and I’ve ADHD. Analysis has proven there’s typically a hyperlink between ADHD and childhood trauma. The works on this present are supposed to relay to the customer the problem of accessing buried reminiscences on account of trauma and the way we supply these traumas in our our bodies and cross them on to the following generations.

Your mother helped you sew a number of textile works within the present — how does stitching join you, your mother and your grandmother?

Stitching, a part of my observe, is finished to honor my maternal grandmother, a couture seamstress whose goals had been dashed by struggle; however it’s also as a result of she might sew that she survived the struggle. It was from her that we each discovered to stitch. Stitching these laboriously detailed items with my mother is a technique I’ve discovered that has helped us discover a frequent area to reckon with what it means to be a refugee. My mom won’t ever instantly reply my questions in regards to the previous. I’ve discovered that within the hours we spend stitching and sitting collectively via silences, sharing the frustrations and rewards of intricate embroidering and large-scale items, permits an area for reminiscences to bubble up and are available to the floor.

Jenny Yurshansky’s “Unfolded Narratives.”

(From Jenny Yurshansky)

Inform us about “Unfolded Narratives,” a large-scale, quilted tapestry within the exhibition created, partly, by college students in Jewish day faculties throughout Los Angeles.

Throughout workshops held at AJU, I led college students from faculties together with Milken Neighborhood Faculty, De Toledo Excessive Faculty and Shalhevet Excessive Faculty on a journey to find their voices by exploring their very own household narratives of immigration, change and resilience. These tales traverse the globe from Iran to New York and had been expressed via collages, drawn photos and narratives which had been then folded into playful paper fortune-tellers. With my mom, I’ve remodeled these small, crafted sculptures into “Unfolded Narratives,” which invitations us to see how all our tales are related and pieced collectively.

How does work within the exhibition communicate to a refugee’s expertise of swiftly gathering household artifacts earlier than fleeing house?

“There Have been No Roses There (Echo)” is a wall-based rubbing of a conventional woven carpet from Moldova. The wall surrounding it’s stained to imitate tobacco residue. It displays the difficult assembly factors of household traditions, home areas and the varied methods questions of house and belonging radiate outward, on a nationwide stage. The work, the residue of a carpet, is a detrimental area — as if a wall carpet had been eliminated, leaving the echo of its fibers behind. One might think about this being the residue of those that left in addition to a shadow of the reminiscences that they maintain inside them.

There’s an interactive audio information within the present through which contributors can roam AJU’s campus and encounter “blacklisted species” of vegetation. What’s the idea right here and the way does it relate to migration?

“Blacklisted: A Planted Allegory (Audio Information)” explores the sociopolitical constructs of borders and belonging by questioning the scientific classification of vegetation as “native,” “non-native” or “invasive” species. Listeners are invited to come across these vegetation on a choose-your-own-adventure model audio strolling tour or as a radio-style drama. It’s a web-based area information for listeners to acquaint themselves with non-native vegetation generally present in California. Every plant is carried out by an actor who anthropomorphizes it via a story, channeling its distinctive historical past and expertise in arriving and settling right here.

These are the tales of generations of migrants. What these vegetation provide us displays a panorama that’s cultural as a lot as it’s botanical, every part from humble weeds to deliberate landscaping. The expertise is supposed to familiarize the viewers with these vegetation to raised perceive the methods through which the panorama is just not solely botanical however historic and cultural — the results of human settlement. The listener can expertise the vegetation as a mirrored image of the folks, historical past, see how they’re part of that narrative, and interact within the typically contentious however nonetheless necessary problems with colonization, migration, borders, citizenship, belonging and otherness.