multimedia installation - radio, newspaper, map, table, chairs, tea service, doily, lamp by Luiza Parvu, Toma Peiu
To time, to distance – AHL Foundation Gallery, New York, NY – March-April, 2026

Gleaning on an oral history archive compiled in post- pandemic New York City, our expanded documentary arts piece is a sonic experience that reflects the mediated-ness of home, belonging, but also the radical forms of mobility and "blissful displacement" enacted by Korean Central Asian communities in the late Soviet Union and the 1990s.

Using a modified VEF 202 Soviet-made transistor, a device that used to be shared by people across the Soviet Union and its successor states when they were on the move, trading, changing homes, studying or seasonally working abroad in the 1980s and 1990s - we put together five "stations" broadcasting snippets of life experience in the late USSR, across the map of NYC; reflections on differences in life circumstances and interactions between various generations of descendants of people displaced from the Russian Far East in 1937.

Staging this piece in juxtaposition with a map of 1991 NYC public transit with a living room setting reminiscent of Central Asia, we question fixed definitions of "home" and "homeland" and celebrate the bliss that displaced people can find in enacting multilayered, complex identities that defy and confront often rigid constructs of ethnicity and race, pronounced from the perspective of settled / settler societies.