Denise Lee &
Eleftheria
Panousi

"From here to there" is a migrating sound piece created by artists Denise Lee and Eleftheria Panousi. What makes the difference between a model minority and a threat? Why do we forget so easily the root causes of forced migration? Why do people leave their homes to find their place in other societies? Who has the power? From the Pontics of the Black Sea to the Chinese diaspora, this collaborative, migrating sound piece wanders through the city, weaving together the micro and the macro and drawing on generational memory through changes in location and context. Found audio provides a sonic, historical, and cultural backdrop for the text, while the artists draw from their own heritages of migration and intersperse personal and familial narratives with historical and political context, connecting these histories by questioning current attitudes toward migration.

Born in the US to Taiwanese parents before migrating to Hong Kong where she spent her early life, Denise Lee moved back to the US to obtain a BFA at Rhode Island School of Design for Furniture Design with a concentration in Nature Culture Sustainability Studies, focusing on postcolonial theory and literature. She has since lived and worked in Peru, Japan, and Germany, where she is now based, having received an MFA at Bauhaus-Universität Weimar in Public Art and New Artistic Strategies. With a background in public art, post-colonial studies, civic education, and object making, Denise creates and facilitates physical and non-physical spaces for connection and dialogue with the intention of dismantling the divisions and miscommunications complicit in the maintenance of hierarchical systems. She is now working at the intersection of oral history, space making, decoloniality, sound, video and text in relation to diaspora and emotionality in urban space, attempting to understand how we inhabit the complexities of modernity.

Eleftheria Panousi was born in Athens, Greece in 1992. She has practised dancing, vocals and music from a young age and uses elements of those fields in her current art practice. From 2012 to 2017 she studied Fine Arts at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki in Greece, and graduated from the MFA Public Art and New Artistic Strategies program at the Bauhaus University of Weimar in Germany in 2020. She has led and participated in exhibitions and workshops since 2014 and her work has been exhibited among others at the Neues Bauhaus Museum of Weimar, Schiller Museum Weimar, Athens and the Epidaurus Festival in Greece, and MOMus museums Thessaloniki, Greece. The mediums she uses vary depending on the project, but the core of her practice consists mainly of video, sound, narration and performance. Recently, she has been working more intensively on short films.