Art Talk with Patty Chang, Vishal Jugdeo, Miljohn Ruperto; moderated by Anuradha Vikram

On the occasion of the exhibition Scratching at the Moon exhibition artists Patty Chang, Vishal Jugdeo, Miljohn Ruperto with engage in a moderated discussion with writer and curator Anuradha Vikram around the themes of the show and the interrelations found in their work.
Patty Chang is a Los Angeles based artist and educator who uses performance, video, installation and narrative forms when considering identity, gender, transnationalism, colonial legacies, the environment, large-scale infrastructural projects and impacted subjectivities. Her most recent collaborative project, Learning Endings, is a multi-part interdisciplinary research that has surfaced amidst the overlapping contexts of climate crisis, threatened ocean ecosystems, and challenges to scientific expertise. It examines the work of scientists who perform necropsies of dead marine mammals as unacknowledged forms of attention and care, and explores how various kinds of art practice can support this care work. Her work has been exhibited at such institutions as the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Guggenheim Museum, New York; New Museum, New York; M+ Museum, Hong Kong; BAK, Basis voor actuele Kunst, Utrecht, and Chinese Arts Centre, Manchester, England. She teaches at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, CA.
Vishal Jugdeo works with video, performance and installation to construct experimental narratives. His work considers the relational and psychical processes of image-making, often blurring fiction and document. In addition to numerous exhibitions and screenings, Jugdeo is a 2015 Guggenheim Foundation Fellow, and New Genres area head in the Department of Art at UCLA.
Miljohn Ruperto is interested in developing approaches to interrogating and expanding our conception of nature and history: e.g. historiography, the history of nature, and the nature of nature.
Anuradha Vikram is a writer, curator, and educator born in New York and based in Los Angeles. They are co-curator of the 2024 Oregon Contemporary Artists’ Biennial and guest curator of the Getty PST Art exhibition Atmosphere of Sound: Sonic Art in Times of Climate Disruption (2024-25) at UCLA Art Sci Center. Recent curatorial projects include Jaishri Abichandani: Flower-Headed Children at Craft Contemporary, Los Angeles (2022), Swept Away: Love Letter to a Surrogate with Warren Neidich, Renée Petropoulos, and Christina Strassfield at Guild Hall, East Hampton Main Beach, New York (2022) and 18th Street Arts Center, Santa Monica State Beach, California (2023), and eX-aMEN-ing Masculinities with LA Freewaves at Los Angeles State Historic Park in 2022.
Vikram’s book Decolonizing Culture (Sming Sming Books, 2017) helped initiate a global movement to decolonize arts institutions and monuments. Their latest book is Use Me At Your Own Risk: Visions from the Darkest Timeline (X Artists’ Books, 2023), using speculative fiction to address current and future social conditions from a techno-critical point of view. They are a contributor to art periodicals including Art in America, The Brooklyn Rail and Los Angeles Review of Books, and publications from Paper Monument, Archive Books, Heyday Press, Routledge, Wiley, and Oxford University Press. They are an Editorial Board member at X-TRA and an editor at X Artists’ Books.
Vikram is faculty at UCLA School of the Arts and Architecture. They hold an MA in Curatorial Practice from California College of the Arts and a BS in Studio Art from NYU.
Scratching at the Moon is the first focused survey of Asian American artists in a major Los Angeles contemporary art museum. Featured artists include Patty Chang, Young Chung, Vishal Jugdeo, Simon Leung, Michelle Lopez, Yong Soon Min, Na Mira, Amanda Ross-Ho, Miljohn Ruperto, Dean Sameshima, Anna Sew Hoy, Amy Yao, and Bruce Yonemoto.
Scratching at the Moon is organized by ICA LA guest curator Anna Sew Hoy and Good Works Executive Director Anne Ellegood, with support from Caroline Ellen Liou, Curatorial Associate.
Major support for Scratching at the Moon is provided by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and Fellows of Contemporary Art.
The exhibition is also generously funded by Tim Disney, Kathleen Kim and Eric Kim, The Audrey and Sydney Irmas Charitable Foundation, the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs, and the Henry Moore Foundation. Additional support provided by the Friends of Scratching at the Moon group fund, including Annie Chu, Noriko Fujinami, Shue and Paul Her-Sturm, Julia Huang, Marilyn Long, Grace Oh and John Chan, Susan Song, Celia Yang, Christopher Yin and John Yoon.
Special thanks to Hen House Studios, Venice, CA.
ICA LA is supported by the Curator’s Council and Fieldwork Council.
This event took place at ICA LA on February 14, 2024.