welcome back, welcome home
The concept for Asha’s Place was first developed as Asha Lester’s thesis work as a student in the Public Art & New Artistic Strategies Masters program at Bauhaus Universität Weimar in the spring-summer of 2019.
Asha’s Place is a sort of space that is constantly metamorphosing, on a pendulum between the tangible and the immaterial. Sometimes it possesses a physical location, and sometimes it is only located in transcontinental video call conversations or on the pages of websites or the surfaces of advertisement columns. However, all of these manifestations are working together towards one point of magic, and that is to employ handmade art objects and images in the facilitation of innumerable kinds of exchange between people, to bring moments of connection. Asha’s Place asks people to engage with the concept of the necessity of things that are not actually necessary for basic survival: creativity, imagination, making, and playing.
Asha’s Place has been incubating for the past 27 years. It has moved incessantly, between the US, China, Canada. It finally hatched into a more tangible presence in the little historic town of Weimar, Germany for a little while.
In April and May 2019, Asha’s Place began to make itself visible as a concept through the Asha’s Place Kickstarter campaign, where you can see a video introducing the project. It made an appearance as a pop-up performance installation at the Schiller Museum on May 18th, 2019, as part of the Imaginary Bauhaus Museum Exhibition, and then at Kiosk.6 every Saturday in June 2019. All of these activities closed out with a Master’s Thesis Defense Presentation in the first week of July at Asha’s home. Later in July, Asha’s Place again picked up and moved to another small town. For this settling phase, it has chosen the town of Springdale, Arkansas, in the United States. Asha is still scouting out her new surroundings and biding her time for the right space to present itself in Springdale where Asha’s Place can express itself tangibly once again.
**During its Weimar phase, Asha’s Place existed in the framework of IMAGINARY BAUHAUS MUSEUM