[The author] Lara Salmon places her relationship with [the artist] Prima Jalichandra-Sakuntabhai at the core of her writing. This piece feels intimate, like we are watching Lara process the effect that Prima has had on her personally, professionally, and intellectually. Written in a conversational style, the paper ebbs and flows with Lara’s feelings about US-centric art, Los Angeles, Prima’s work, and Covid-19. I find Lara’s writing to be beautiful and compelling in its almost diary-like quality and emphasis on feeling and memory.

Lara’s identification with Prima’s unrequited longing and yearning demonstrates an affective connection to Prima’s performance, one that exists in defiance of conventional forms of knowledge and the intimidating nature of an informational lecture.

Lara’s making sense of Prima stands in comparison to Prima’s making sense of their transnational identity, history, and be/longing. Chloropsis Aurifrons Pridii is a performative lecture and archive; it complicates the historical archive by uncovering alternative narratives and performatively staging an epistemological act in the form of a lecture.

Review excerpt from Erica Maria Cheung.

About the Artist:

Prima Jalichandra-Sakuntabhai is a transdisciplinary artist, working across performance, video and installation, based in Los Angeles. Born in Thailand in 1989, they grew up in Europe before moving to the US in 2011. 

They received their Visual Arts Degree from the Ecole des Beaux Arts de Nantes Metropole and a License in Film Studies at the Sorbonne Nouvelle-Paris 3. They hold a BFA at the School of the Arts Institute of Chicago and a MFA at the California College of the Arts, in San Francisco. They are a recipient of the SOMA Summer Award, Mexico City in 2016 and the emi kuriyama spirit award in 2020. 

Recent projects include: Stranger Intimacy, residency at the ONE Archives and USC Pacific Asia Museum (LA), Chloropsis Aurifrons Pridii, The Fulcrum Press (LA), Excerpts of Memories From the Screen, a Zoom performative lecture for BOOKSHOP LIBRARY, BANGKOK CITY CITY GALLERY (Bangkok), Irrational Exhibits 11: Place-Making and Social Memory, Track 16 (LA). They curated the MAHA Pavilion for the Bangkok Biennial 2020.

[https://www.primasakuntabhai.com/]

About the Author:

Lara Salmon is a performance artist whose body-based practice explores socio-historic formations of landscape. Lara lives in Los Angeles, and has had eight solo and over thirty group exhibitions in the U.S., Cyprus, Germany, Lebanon, Morocco and Cuba. She has a BA from the University of California, Berkeley and an MFA from Claremont Graduate University.

Her current work involves site-specific performance, film and writing relating to her inherited relationship with the mining landscape of Cyprus. She was awarded the Grand Prix of the 2021 Larnaca Biennale in Cyprus for her performance Saline dissonance. Yon Natalie Mik wrote about Lara for The Invisible Archive’s Vol. Berlin Issue #1 in 2019.

[https://www.larasalmon.net/]