Although the reasons for expatriation may vary from self-imposed immigration to political exile, the response to a new cultural setting is typically the same: an experience of distinct otherness with all its attendant terrors. Tonight's program concentrates on the outcries of women who live outside their primary culture, offering tapes vastly different in their aesthetics but chillingly united by feelings of sadness, rage and exclusion. The Darkness of My Language, by Brazilian Silvana Afram (Canada), is a terse video poem about cultural ignorance. Here, misnomers about language become devices for miscommunication. In Self-Immolation As an Anachronism, Malaysian Azian Nurudin reflects on the seemingly barbaric rituals of Asia from the vantage point of the United States. Bride-burning and clitoridechtomy become decontextualized practices uglier for lack of a cultural setting. Indian Pratibha Parmar vents her righteous rage in Sari Red, a handsome work about the murder of a friend in England. Using motifs from Hindu culture, Parmar examines the ubiquitous horrors of living in a racist society. In Measures of Distance (England), Palestinian Mona Hatoum explores the isolation imposed by war. Through family correspondence read in voice-over and a scrim of Arabic script, Hatoum's moving tape depicts the yearning for cultural roots and the silence felt in its absence. Israeli-born artist Irit Batsry's Leaving the Old Ruin (U.S.) traces the relationship between landscape and history. But it is loss of place, of cultural grounding, that seems to be the poetic center for this formidable work. Heavily synthesized images construct a visual realm that casts history as personal consciousness. Batsry's revelation is hopeful: a collapsing past resurrected in a future of understanding. -Steve Seid