The Unrequited Love Institute (T.U.L.I.)

The Unrequited Love Institute (T.U.L.I.) is a large-scale, immersive installation that adopts the visual language and procedural logic of an institutional office. Structured as a fictional bureaucracy dedicated to the “refinement” of immigrants, the exhibition uses satire to examine how systems of regulation, compliance, and delay shape identity, belonging, and memory.

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Visitors enter a fully realized administrative environment that includes a reception desk, numbered waiting system, orientation video, bulletin boards, and monitoring tools. Participation is central to the experience: visitors take a number, receive a wait time measured in decades, and are invited to engage with the Institute’s systems throughout the space.

The exhibition integrates a series of works presented as archival materials labeled Artifacts from Before Times. These projects are framed as documents produced prior to institutional “recalibration” and include printed reports, data visualizations, instructional tools, and intergenerational narrative works. Familiar bureaucratic formats like charts, manuals, clocks, and forms are repurposed to hold personal and familial histories.

While T.U.L.I. employs humor and institutional parody, it functions as a sustained critique of how administrative systems process lived experience over time. By placing intimate narratives inside bureaucratic structures, the exhibition foregrounds the emotional labor, delay, and erasure embedded in systems designed to standardize identity.

Exhibition Details

The Unrequited Love Institute team consists of: Amy Chou, Alex Cabrera, Ian Coyne, James Coyne, Josh Belveal and Zaara Saleem.

Photos by Samantha Chow

Additional support from: Christian Ramírez, Chad Musch, Bethany Wearden, Paul Welden, Luu Dagda, CJ Mascarelli, David Lorello, Tenea Hudson, Peyton Bailey, Goolam Saber, Shachi Kale, Madeline Sayet, Po-Min Wang, June Jung, Deborah Sussman, Morton Scult, Tempe Public Art, Arizona Commission on the Arts, Define American, AAPI Civic Engagement Fund.