Vietnamese artist and activist Mai Khoi will perform Bad Activist on January 27 as part of Pitt Arts' Artful Wednesdays.
Bad Activist is an autobiographical performance piece, combining storytelling with state-of-the-art music performance. The narrative charts the extraordinary trajectory of Mai Khoi’s life. Khoi becomes a celebrated pop star in Vietnam. Bad Activist explores both the actual historic events of the artist’s life, as well as the subconscious dream worlds that have fueled her work.She is also profiled in a WESA.fm piece today:
Mai ended up in Pittsburgh this fall thanks to the Artist Protection Fund, a program of the International Free Expression Project. The APF contacted Pitt’s Global Studies Center about hosting her. She was accepted into the Center’s Scholars at Risk program. While she’s not technically a scholar, “she’s really in the thick of a bunch of issues which as recent events underscore again, are just the essential issues of our political moment,” said Michael Goodhart, the political science professor who created the program.The Pitt Arts performance begins at 12:00 pm on the 27th and will be streamed on Youtube.