Lani Asuncion is an artist participating in the Somerville Museum’s current Community Curator exhibition, Sanctuary City by Julia Csekö.

Duty-Free Paradise is a performance by multimedia Boston Filipinx artist Lani Asuncion and mezzo soprano Pauline Tan. This work is part of a new series SONGS for LAND far away at SEA by Asuncion that focuses on connections between Hawaii and the Philippines and the Trans-Pacific connections between the Pacific, West Coast, and New England histories of ecotourism, biopolitics, and militarism; it aims to find points of healing of ancestral intergenerational trauma narratives through the work. In this performance both artists will take an approach of improvisation with Lani doing experimental voice work and playing the ancient kulintang gong from the Philippines while Pauline will sing traditional Filipino Folk songs in the Ilocano operatic style.

This performance is part of the Sanctuary City exhibition programming and will take place at the Somerville Museum

ADMISSION: $10; active Museum members free (use code MEMBER); Please arrive early as event will begin promptly at 7:00 p.m.

PARKING: The Somerville Museum has no dedicated parking spots. Please note visitor parking spots on Westwood Road, Central Street, and Highland Ave. Visit our website for more information.

ACCESSIBILITY: The Somerville Museum is now ADA compliant. For more information contact us at info@somervillemuseum.org.

Lani Asunción (they/she) is an interdisciplinary multimedia artist creating socially engaged art in both private and public spaces, independently and collaboratively. Weaving a visual language guided by historical research, community engagement, and experimental performance connected to their identity as a queer multiracial Filipinx-American. Asunción integrates new media technologies and transmedia storytelling through ritualized performance to encourage conversations that magnify connections to facilitate healing in the face of cultural violence, oppression, and ancestral intergenerational trauma narratives. Asunción has performed live at Studios at MASS MoCA, Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Little Berlin in Philadelphia, and Aurora Picture Show in Houston, TX. Asunción is an awardee of the Live Arts Boston Grant (2020) from the Boston Foundation, City of Boston’s Transformative Public Art grant (2020), Dame Joan Sutherland Fund from the Australian American Association (2017), and the Kala Fellowship (2023) from the Kala Arts Institute. Their project Revolutionary AYAT was awarded the 2022 New England Foundation for the Arts Public Art for Spatial Justice grant. They are founding member and Producing Artistic Director of Boston multimedia collective Digital Soup.

LANI ASUNCIÓN (laniasuncion.com) | @ lani.asuncion | @dfp_dutyfreeparadise

Pauline Tan is a Filipino-Chinese mezzo-soprano whose deep love for poetry and song has taken her across the globe to pursue a career in music. She strives not only to communicate honestly with her audiences but also to help bridge connections to little-known musical worlds. A recent graduate of the Bard Vocal Arts Program, Pauline hopes to keep working with artists and organizations that share her vision of bringing more diversity and compassion in the arts. She is currently with Chicago Opera Theater as a Resident Young Artist, and will be seen this season in the premiere of Shawn Okpebholo and Mark Campbell’s “The Cook-Off.” Pauline looks forward to continuing to follow her artistic compass and taking part in non-standard adaptations of familiar operas as well as premieres of new works by living BIPOC composers.

Pauline Tan (paulinetanmezzo.com)