The Red Chador’s Provocative Public Performance

It is a sight as arresting as it is provocative. Multimedia artist Anida Yoeu Ali, clad in the garment that lends her persona its name, wields a cleaver and threatens a French baguette with “execution” unless her outrageous demands are met.

The Red Chador performance piece is not only a commentary on Islamophobia, race, and gender, but also “lays bare the ‘unmooring’ of Muslim selfhood in a post-9/11 U.S. body politic,” argues Cambodian American studies scholar Cathy J. Schlund-Vials.

In this piece, which Schlund-Vials describes as “an ‘agitative’ piece meant to elicit unplanned and unscripted audience responses,” Ali dons an Iranian garment that has become synonymous with “a homogenizing reading of ‘Muslim-ness’” worldwide. In contrast to the somber black chador associated with Islamic fundamentalism, Ali’s garish outfit upends stereotypes, as it “is both spectacular and a spectacle,” “playful and provocative,” and “visually anomalous and tactically conspicuous,” Schlund-Vials points out.

The Red Chador made its debut in 2015 as part of a Southeast Asian exhibition commissioned by the Palais de Tokyo in Paris. In the character of The Red Chador, Ali silently walks through Parisian sites like subways, churches, cafés, and the Eiffel Tower.

Born in Battambang in 1974, and resettling in Chicago after the Cambodian genocide, Ali is a 1.5 generation refugee from the Cham Muslim minority. She began her artistic career in slam poetry and theater in the 1990s. After she returned to Cambodia in 2004, her art evolved from a focus on Asian American politics to a “decidedly more international” outlook featuring “more overt engagements with refugee/Muslim subjectivity,” Schlund-Vials writes.

Her performance culminates in the stylized dismemberment of baguettes in tandem with impossible demands, such as calling for all girls in France to be renamed “Fatima.”

“This constructive tension, which assumes form in hyperbolic performance, exaggerated gesture, and non-curated audience response, satirically replicates the irrational parameters of Islamophobia and anti-Muslim loathing,” Schlund-Vials writes.

Yet Ali’s act does not only evoke terrorist incidents such as the Charlie Hebdo attack, perpetrated by Muslim extremists, just a few months prior to The Red Chador. The bread “beheading” also calls to mind “the terror of the guillotine and the cultural imperialism of the baguette,” Schlund-Vials observes. “Both the guillotine and the baguette were exported to the colonies as a means of establishing—to varying degrees and to very divergent ends—French colonial hegemony through violence and assimilation.”

Ali did not meet overt opposition or anti-Muslim sentiment during her performance of The Red Chador in Paris. However, the piece garnered a very different response when it was restaged in Hartford, Connecticut, where Ali was a visiting faculty member at Trinity College. Schlund-Vials reports that the artist encountered such pronounced hostility that accompanying crew members had to step in when Ali was threatened by passersby.

Similarly, Ali’s original plans to perform The Red Chador at the Smithsonian Institution’s Asian Pacific American Center in 2016 were rejected by organizers. Ali’s initial proposal—to display American flags painted white and bearing the Arabic word for peace—was deemed “too political and divisive,” while her offer to read passages from the Bible and Qur’an was also dismissed by Smithsonian officials. Ultimately, she performed The Red Chador by standing silently in her trademark garment amid a profusion of American flags.

Even with the changes imposed by curators, Schlund-Vials concludes that Ali accomplished The Red Chador’s objective of juxtaposing the “patriotic emblem and religious dress” that jointly represent the artist’s overlapping Muslim and American identities.

The rest of Ali’s confrontational art also reflects her background as a Muslim refugee from Cambodia. For example, Palimpsest for Generation 1.5, which was first staged in 2009, used her bare back as a surface to inscribe and erase phrases—such as “No Choice But to Leave”—that attest to her family’s history of displacement and forced migration.

With The Red Chador, Ali “unfailingly returns to a hybrid location as ‘Cambodian American Muslim transnational.’”

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