Opia (Heather M. O'Brien-Takahashi and Jonathan Takahashi)

Opia is a researched-based collaboration between Heather M. O'Brien-Takahashi and Jonathan Takahashi. Rooted in lens and screen-based practices, Opia reveals inaccuracies in visual representation. An opia is a condition of sight, or the ambiguous intensity of looking someone in the eye, which can feel simultaneously invasive and vulnerable—pupils glittering, opaque and endless. Their projects have led them from complex familial photographic archives of WWII to the flows of water politics and poetics in Beirut, Lebanon. Opia is concerned with how the site of place, shelter and community directly define issues of identity and belonging. It is within this site of locality that the personal and political are inextricably linked. Research interests include expanded cinema and psychoanalysis, alternative histories of photography and the contemporary essay film. Opia aims to create a Third Cinema Space, informed by Homi K. Bhaba’s Third Space Theory.

Opia works in film/video, photography and installation and they have shown their work Internationally at museums, galleries, and educational/organizational spaces including The Center for Arts & Humanities at the American University of Beirut (Lebanon), The Windows of Little Tokyo - Little Tokyo Service Center (Los Angeles, CA), KW Institute for Contemporary Art (Berlin, Germany), Beppu Project (Oita, Japan) and The Geffen Contemporary at Museum of Contemporary Art (Los Angeles, CA).

Opia received their MFAs from CalArts, and have been members of the Los Angeles Tenants Union, School of Echoes Los Angeles and Critical Resistance. They have been awarded residencies and fellowships with Sommerakademie Paul Klee (Bern, Switzerland) and FLOATS – The Floating Laboratory of Action & Theory at Sea (Samos, Greece)