Screening:
Le Voyage Dans L'imaginaire
Sunday
June 2, 2019
4-6pm
Before the birth of technology, human tracked time through
natural transformation. Recording technology has allowed us the
flexibility to freeze or fast-forward spaces and time, which has
also opened up to creative analysis. Within the process of
documentation, reassessment, and invention, we have realized that
perception of time and space is often fluid instead of fixed,
subjective instead of objective - some of whose aspects even
belong solely to the realm of imagination.
Parodying the classic Le Voyage Dans la Lune (A Trip to the
Moon) (1902) by Georges Méliès, Le Voyage Dans L'imaginaire
(A Trip to the Imagination) isn’t only call-back to the history of
cinema but also as a reminder of the France's continuing colonial
influence worldwide. It is also a reflection of how Vietnam unlike
the rest of East Asian countries has entered modernity through the
adoption of romanized language system during the French
colonial period.
Creating various creative strategies of navigating with images and
capturing time from the use of science fiction, texts, found
footage, digital manipulation to documentary, the artists have
attempted to record and reflect on their different realities in
different levels both from the personal to the public. Above all the
journeys each of them embark on is a timeless one with the effort
to explore different spheres, observing time and making sense of
one’s being in the world.
Glad I made it on time, 10’, 2018 by Phan Anh
Mars in the Well, 19’, 2014 by Freddy Nadolny Poustochkine &
Truong Minh Quy
The Story of Ones, 11’, 2011 by Pham Ngoc Lan
From Baudelaire to, 11’, 2018 by Le Xuan Tien
Skyzoo, 4’, 2014 by Thuy T. Nguyen
Personal Notes on Collective Memories, 29’, 2018 by Vicky Do
Glad I made it on time, 2018
The work offers the audience access to multiple approaches to
seeing materials and phenomena with subjectivities. Through his
practice of collecting objects, Phan Anh suggests a figure made
out of the stones that he collected from all over the city of
Gwangju; a cairn with more than 50000 hand-written Korean
letters was constructed that serves as a landmark for his culture at
the age of globalization.
Mars in the well, 2014
In 2053, Vietnam is submerged in water. People have to move to
the higher places for survival. The Vietnamese government has
tried more than once to carry people to Mars, but their attempt
turns out to be just a bitter failure....
The Story of Ones, 2011
Utilizing the banality of Vietnamese state radio broadcasts,
The Story of Ones gives a face and a sense of place to the unseen
and offers a personal counterpoint to the officially sanctioned.
Like entering a roomful of stories, the viewer steps into an
unfamiliar space guided only by the sound of the radio tuning into
lifestyle programming, call-in shows and radio dramas. The
portraits and settings layered atop the aural landscape create
questions, provide humor, offer context and withdraw explanation
of what once seemed clear before entering the room.
From Baudelaire to, 2018
The work manifests a loosening of rational choices, instigated by
a reading of the poem “To the Reader” from Charles Baudelaire’s
collection The Flowers of Evil, combined with a viewing of
Nha San Collective’s 15th-anniversary documentary. The visual
condensations or continuations of the images were reproduced
through some sense or instinct of the maker, it’s the process of the
footages were being found themselves, associated with a four-
limbed structure, spreading in four directions from a central zone.
Skyzoo, 2014
When I first saw Skymall magazine on a flight, I discovered an
interesting angle of American consumerism. The creativity and
absurdity of Skymall's products inspired me to create this work.
I used found images and videos from shopping catalogs and
flyers. I am interested in the image recycling process that is
inevitable in popular culture. I filter what is interesting,
appropriate, and important in the new content and context of the
work.
Personal Notes on Collective Memories, 2018
Vicky’s project begins with the neighborhood she resides –
District 4 – one of the twenty-four districts that make up Saigon,
Vietnam’s largest city. Notoriously known for its history of violent
crime and social maladies, District 4 was once neglected and itself
deemed a malady of the city, sheltering the underbelly of society.
It has now become a hotspot for property development,
undergoing vast-scale structural change. A juxtaposition of a
gloomy past and a seemingly illuminating present, mixed with
extreme poverty and extreme wealth, District 4 embodies an urban
reality commonly found in various Asian megacities, where issues
of social inequality, segregation and displacement are becoming
more pronounced than ever before. In this constant social flux,
how does one create their place of contentment to find their
“home”? Inspired by the elements that make up the genius loci of
District 4 and its inhabitants, Vicky employs the language of
video art, installation, sculpture and story-telling, blurring the
representational boundaries between personal and collective
memories, fact and fiction. Digging variously as both a part-taker
and an observer, an insider and an outcast, she questions what it
means to feel a belonging towards a location and community; how
a “home” can be a place for both the one and the many.
Artist biographies:
Phan Anh (b.1990) is a multidisciplinary artist. Graduated from
HCMC Fine Arts University and received his MFA from Utrecht
School of the Arts (The Netherlands). He is currently based in
Saigon. His works use personal and collective memories to
explore both mental and physical possibilities of human beings in
correlation with beliefs in abstract concepts. For him, art making
has always been an honest effort to make sense of himself as one
individual who plays an unpredictable part in phenomena.
Truong Minh Quy (b.1990), a Vietnamese filmmaker, lives and
works here and there in the vibrancy of memories and present
moments. His narratives and images, lying between document and
fiction, personal and impersonal, draw on the landscape of his
homeland, childhood memories, and the historical context of
Vietnam. He has exhibited his films at Clermont-Ferrand Film
Festival, Oberhausen Film Festival, Les Rencontres
Internationales Paris/Berlin and VideoBrasil.
Pham Ngoc Lan (b.1986, Hanoi). He studied urban design and
urban planning from 2004 to 2009 at Hanoi Architecture
University (HAU). Inspired by the paradox of all living things,
Lan considers himself an urban life observer rather than an artist
or urban designer. Using photography and video as two of the
favourite tools to express his ideas, his work attaches special
importance to the direct, poetic and especially the whimsical
respects of human life.
Le Xuan Tien (b. 1995) is a cinema-based moving image
practitioner currently based in Hanoi, Vietnam. Tien graduated
from Hanoi Academy of Theatre and Cinema in 2017 with a
degree in Cinematography. Since 2015, he has started practicing
and working with moving images independently. Using and
continually exploring moving images as the main medium, Tien
puts his efforts on walking in circle, trying to raise his head up
and look towards God.
Infinithuy is the internet-name of Thúy T. Nguyễn. Thúy (b. 1991)
is a Ha Nội-born, New York-based artist & designer. She studied
visual arts and media at Bennington College. Her work spans
multiple disciplines, aiming to push the boundaries between art,
design, and technology. Thúy's work has been shown in New
York, Boston, Tokyo, Paris and Ha Nội. She is the founder of A
Home Visit (Bạn Đến Chơi Nhà), a Vietnamese creative collective
in New York City, that brings like-minded people together to
facilitate conversation and sincere interaction.
Vicky Do (b. 1990, Saigon) graduated from Texas Tech
University, going on to complete an MFA in Creative Media at
City University of Hong Kong. She has worked in Hong Kong as
a researcher and an independent artist. She is a member of
Floating Projects and Archive of the People in Hong Kong. She
now works as the curator for Chaosdowntown Chao and a
researcher and production lead for San Art, a longest running
independent art initiative in Saigon. Her work focuses on the
displacement of people, urban planning and archival practices.
Đỗ Tường Linh (b.1987) is an art researcher and curator based in
Hà Nội, Việt Nam, whose work concentrates on conceptual art,
post-colonial studies and the relationship between art and politics.
Graduated from Vietnam University of Fine Arts and received her
M.A in Contemporary Art & Art Theory of Asia and Africa from
SOAS, University of London. She is the co-founder and artistic
director of Six Space (www.sixspace.vn), an artist-run venue in
Hà Nội. Linh has been participating in a wide range of local &
international art projects and collaborations, such as “Behind the
Terrain” - Traveling exhibition in Indonesia; Việt Nam & Japan
(2017-2018); “SEA Currents,” London, UK (2017); Arts Space
Network Residency at Asia Culture Center, Gwangju, Korea
(2018); “To Edit is To Resist! The Art Book Fair of the Africas,”
La Colonie, Paris, France (2018); Site and Space in Southeast
Asia (2018-2020); SEAΔ Mekong Cultural Hub (2018-2019) and
Asia-Art-Activism (2018-present).