Soft Water Hard Stone, New Museum Triennial, Oct 29 2021 - Jan 23 2022

Soft Water Hard Stone,” the fifth New Museum Triennial, brings together works across mediums by forty artists and collectives from around the world.

The title of the 2021 Triennial, “Soft Water Hard Stone,” is taken from a Brazilian proverb, versions of which are found across cultures:

Água mole em pedra dura, tanto bate até que fura (Soft water on hard stone hits until it bores a hole).

The proverb can be said to have two meanings: if one persists long enough, the desired effect can eventually be achieved; and time can destroy even the most perceptibly solid materials. The title speaks to ideas of resilience and perseverance, and the impact that an insistent yet discrete gesture can have in time. It also provides a metaphor for resistance, as water—a constantly flowing and transient material—is capable of eventually dissolving stone—a substance associated with permanence, but also composed of tiny particles that can collapse under pressure.

In this moment of profound change, where structures that were once thought to be stable are disintegrating or on the edge of collapse, the 2021 Triennial recognizes artists re-envisioning traditional models, materials, and techniques beyond established paradigms. Their works exalt states of transformation, calling attention to the malleability of structures, porous and unstable surfaces, and the fluid and adaptable potential of both technological and organic mediums. Throughout the exhibition, artists address the regenerative potential of the natural world and our inseparable relationship to it, and grapple with entrenched legacies of colonialism, displacement, and violence. Their works look back at overlooked histories and artistic traditions, while at the same time look forward toward the creative potential that might give dysfunctional or discarded remains new life. It is through their reconfigurations and reimaginings that we are reminded of not only our temporality, but also our adaptability—fundamental characteristics we share, and that keep us human.

“Soft Water Hard Stone” is curated by Margot Norton, Allen and Lola Goldring Curator at the New Museum, and Jamillah James, Senior Curator, The Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (ICA LA), with Jeanette Bisschops, Curatorial Fellow, and Bernardo Mosqueira, ISLAA Curatorial Fellow.

The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue copublished by the New Museum and Phaidon Press Limited. Designed by Elizabeth Karp-Evans and Adam Turnbull of Studio Pacific, the catalogue and includes contributions from Jamillah James, Margot Norton, Karen Archey, Eunsong Kim, and Bernardo Mosqueira, and features original interviews with all forty artists participating in the exhibition.

https://www.newmuseum.org/exhibitions/view/2021-triennial-soft-water-hard-stone

Becoming Alluvium, 09 October–18 December 2021, Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane, Australia

Becoming Alluvium is the first exhibition in Australia by Ho Chi Min City-based artist Thao Nguyen Phan. This single-channel colour film is her most recent work and continues her ongoing research into the Mekong River and the cultures that it nurtures. Through allegory it explores the environmental and social changes caused by the expansion of agriculture, overfishing and economic migration of farmers to urban areas. Phan states, “In recent decades, human intervention on the river body has been so violent that it has forever transformed the nature of its flow and the fate of its inhabitants.”

Although non-chronological in narrative and associative in logic, Becoming Alluvium unfolds over three-chapters telling stories of destruction, reincarnation, and renewal. Bringing together a host of literary references from Khmer folktales, the poetry of Rabindranath Tagore, to The Lover by Maguerite Duras, and Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities. History and mythology flow and ebb through this film, like the river it traces which snakes through Tibet, China, Burma, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam. Combining self-shot footage, animation and found imagery, the work weaves narratives concerning industrialisation, food security and ecological sustainability with folklore and myth. The IMA is thrilled to present this contemplative work in our own river city.

• Produced by the Han Nefkens Foundation. Thao Nguyen Phan is represented by Galerie Zink Waldkirchen.

• https://ima.org.au/exhibitions/becoming-alluvium/

MOMENTA BIENNALE DE L'IMAGE Sensing Nature 17th edition Sept 8 – Oct 24, 2021, Montreal, Canada

MOMENTA BIENNALE DE L'IMAGE

Curated by Stefanie Hessler in collaboration with Camille Georgeson-Usher, Maude Johnson, and Himali Singh Soin, the 17th edition of the biennale takes place from September 8 to October 24, 2021.

This edition of MOMENTA can be read in multiple ways. On the one hand, it assumes a human who is sensing nature, perhaps holding a blueberry picked in a forest, exposed to various modes of perception: sight, smell, taste, hearing, and touch. On the other hand, it assumes nature sensing back.

People, Victory and Life after the War, the Nguyen Art Foundation

A two-chapter exhibition from the Nguyen Art Foundation collection

26 March 2021 – 28 April 2022
Monday to Friday - 8 am to 5 pm
EMASI School Nam Long & Van Phuc Campuses

The Nguyen Art Foundation is proud to present ‘People, Victory and Life after the War’, an art exhibition showcasing war sketches and contemporary artworks from its collection. The exhibition is the first public showing of the collection and marks the opening of two dedicated Art Spaces, an initiative of the Nguyen Art Foundation in partnership with the EMASI Schools.

Curated by Ms Gridthiya Gaweewong and students from Renaissance International School, EMASI International School, Nam Long and Van Phuc Campus, the exhibition aimed to use the curatorial process and exhibition-making as educational tools to engage students participation and ultimately enhance the art appreciation and visual experience. A secondary objective was to work with the collection as a way to encourage students to learn about Vietnam’s art history in association with its social and political context.

Students were encouraged to select the works from the Nguyen Art collection, rationalize their choices and group them together through online meetings and a workshop. Based on this experiment, the exhibition slowly took shape. Its title was inspired by one of the students who encapsulated the sentiments of younger generations towards Vietnamese socio-political history.

Questions raised during the process include how historical artists reflected on their own artworks in today’s context, and how young contemporary artists perceived the memories of the war and, most importantly, how students and the young generation relate to this part of history. The curator collaborated with students, art teachers and the staff to stage the exhibition online during Covid–19.

‘People, Victory and Life after the War’ focus on the past, present and imagined future of Vietnamese artistic practices and was constructed in two chapters, hosted simultaneously at EMASI Nam Long and Van Phuc campus throughout the 2021 school calendar.

The first chapter focuses directly on the American war memory and experiences, with close-up perspectives rendered in war sketches by Army artists and contemporary works by young artists from Vietnam and beyond. The second chapter focuses on war sketches of people, daily lives in the war zone and landscapes juxtaposed with works by contemporary artists who dealt with their distant, abstract and spatial memories about the war experience and its remnants. Both chapters demonstrate the interplay of reflexive memory which slowly shifted from the close-up to lonter shot and panoramic views that both manifest transgeneration of artists perception, imagination and sub-consciousness in a border context.

The two-chapter exhibition attempts to establish a dialog among trans-generations of artists, art lovers and students and features 24 artists with more than 100 historical war drawings and contemporary art from the Nguyen Art Foundation Collection.

The exhibition will be on view from 26 March 2021 to 28 April 2022.

Special thanks to the participant students, art teachers, MoT+++ team and to the Post Vidai Collection.

https://nguyenartfoundation.com/People-Victory-and-Life-after-the-War

WITHIN / BETWEEN / BENEATH / UPON, 13 March - 6 June 2021, The Factory Contemporary Arts Centre, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

Artists: Thảo Nguyên Phan, Richard Streitmatter-Trần, Lê Hiền Minh
Curators: Bill Nguyễn, Vân Đỗ
Exhibition dates: 13 March – 6 June 2021‘Within / Between / Beneath / Upon’ focuses on the art of sculpture by three internationally acclaimed Vietnamese artists Lê Hiền Minh, Richard Streitmatter-Trần and Thảo Nguyên Phan (with a special display dedicated to the late Modernist sculptor Điềm Phùng Thị). Coming from diverse media backgrounds (Hiền Minh originally in lacquer, Richard in new media and Thảo Nguyên in painting), each of these artists has gone on to experiment with varying methods and materials, committed to reflecting the perspectives of their local contexts, evident in their subject matters and materials with which they work.

‘Within’, ‘between’, ‘beneath’, ‘upon’ are concepts of place and time that not only tell us where something or someone is located, but also influences the direction of our gaze. Thus, the gallery space of this exhibition, and the accompanying display strategies of the selected artwork, have been designed to enhance our local audience experience, to further expand their understanding of sculpture today. 

In Vietnam, contemporary art is not taught within its university curricula. Sculpture is thus generally still associated with religious statues in temples and pagodas (a form of folk art that is deeply integrated into the spiritual life of local Vietnamese people); as grand political monuments that are socialist realist in style, that continue to be erected throughout the country as reminders of power and control; or as outdoor decoration whereby ‘form’ precedes any purpose or content, and is often a replication of an ‘international’ style (with rarely an acknowledgment or intention). These examples recall sculptural forms where composition, style, shape, material and colour are of primary concern, when art was approached classically and formally, and not considered a cross-disciplinary, conceptually-driven, comparative practice. 

This exhibition thus investigates influence — be it personal histories (of family and travel), collective legacies (found in architectural design and religious monuments), or interdisciplinary reciprocity (of methodology and knowledge from different disciplines) — aspiring to show how Lê Hiền Minh, Richard Streitmatter-Trần and Thảo Nguyên Phan understand and enrich the practice, meaning and value of sculpture today.

In this exhibition, sculptural installations are elevated to emphasize the distance of social inequality; some lie closely to the floor to accentuate the weight of history; while others invite us to look intimately into the layers of materials and forms. Lê Hiền Minh playfully challenges our collective understanding of monumentality and femininity, mounting larger-than-life structures in Dó paper, where magnificent figures of goddesses from multiple indigenous beliefs are amalgamated with home appliances – provoking, while also acknowledging, the strength of women in their seeming invisibility. Inspired by different periods of art history, techniques and cultures, Richard Streitmatter-Trần assembles industrial and ephemeral materials (such as steel, concrete, rice paper and moss) into hybridized forms that float, lie still or hang in the balance between the elements – defying the assumption of permanence in materiality and its determination of an artwork’s final form and meaning. Thảo Nguyên Phan’s preoccupation with historical artefacts and various folk tales invites the inclusion of work by the late renowned Vietnamese modernist artist Điềm Phùng Thị, whose unique geometric stone sculptures and fabric collages inspire Thảo Nguyên to create her own response (of wood, lacquer and paint), continuing to re-narrate and employ the complex and often contested oral and recorded history of Vietnam.

Borrowed things, others found
                Dislocated narratives, others joined
                                  Covered surfaces, others laid bare.
                                                Recognizable forms, others defamiliarized
                                                                      Man-made shapes, others crafted by nature
                                                                                        Traditional materials, others unconventional

* The Factory would like to extend special thanks to Mr Phan Đình Hối for his generous lending of artwork by Điềm Phùng Thị for this exhibition.

CARNIVALESCA WAS MALEREI SEIN KÖNNTE / WHAT PAINTING MIGHT BE, 6.3. - 2.5.2021

Teilnehmende Künstler*innen / Participating artists:
Firelei Báez, Semiha Berksoy, Anna Betbeze, Anna Boghiguian, Hugo Canoilas, Beatriz González, El Hadji Sy, Donna Huanca, Helen Johnson, Lee Kit, Victor Man, Thao Nguyen Phan, Khalil Rabah, Raphaela Vogel

Opening@Home
5.3.2021, 19 Uhr
Sprecher*innen / Speakers: Bettina Steinbrügge & Andás Siebold

Laufzeit / Duration
6.3. - 2.5.2021

https://www.kunstverein.de/en/ausstellungen/aktuell/carnivalesca

Shoreline Movements, Movement 2 (07 December - 27 December 2020), Taipei Biennial 2020

A PROJECT BY

• Council

CURATED BY

• Erika Balsom

• Grégory Castéra

SPATIAL DESIGN BY

• Daniel Steegmann Mangrané

FILMS BY

• Peggy Ahwesh

• Karimah Ashadu

• Joshua Bonnetta

• Edith Dekyndt

• Maya Deren

• Patricio Guzmán

• Sky Hopinka

• Hu Tai-li

• Johan van der Keuken

• Rebecca Meyers

• Carlos Motta

• Beatriz Santiago Muñoz

• Thao Nguyen Phan

• Jessica Sarah Rinland

• Ben Rivers

• Francisco Rodriguez

• Tsuchimoto Noriaki

• Zhou Tao

This exhibition is part of the inquiry On Becoming Earthlings, initiated in 2015 in the frame of the Climate change conference (COP21).1

Wind tugging at my sleeve
feet sinking into sand
I stand at the edge where earth touches ocean
where the two overlap
a gentle coming together
at other times and places a violent clash.

–Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, 1987

The shoreline is an unusual kind of boundary. Whereas most boundaries enforce separation, it is a threshold marked by contact and negotiation, change and instability. It is a place of arrivals and departures, of safe harbours and hostile intrusions. At once embedded in local traditions and subject to industrial development, it is a site of encounter between different populations and environments. In the case of marine shorelines, the intertidal zone – exposed to the air at low tide and immersed in water at high tide – is an in-between realm of intermittent transformation, containing a high diversity of species that have found ways to survive together within the challenging flux of the ecosystem. As the planet heats up and water levels rise, the shoreline is among the places where our vulnerability to climate emergency is made most manifest.2

Shoreline Movements is a film program that approaches the threshold between land and water as a material environment and as a provocative metaphor for the uncertainties and conflicts of worldly existence. By attending to the shifting frontier of the shoreline and the organisms that inhabit it, we can learn to think ecologically, which means understanding the fluid relations that exist between a vast array of agents, to the point that presumed separations between them are put into question. Sometimes these relations are harmonious, but they can equally be characterized by discord and violence; the shoreline is where seemingly irreconcilable worlds confront one another in negotiations without end. 3

Across eighteen works of cinematic non-fiction made between 1944 and 2020, Shoreline Movements explores how artists and filmmakers have addressed the manifold encounters that take place in the littoral zone, broaching issues of environmental crisis, indigeneity, coloniality, community, and otherness. Presented within a space designed by Daniel Steegmann Mangrané, across six cycles that come and go like the tides, these films search for ways to render sensible the particularity and complexity of reality, embracing filmic and verbal language as nontransparent mediators that aid in this task. Through a wide range of strategies – from observation and the interview to speculative fiction and the essay form – they confront the difficulty and the desirability of building a shared world when deep divisions and power asymmetries everywhere prevail. In the aftermath of harm and loss, they imagine possibilities of repair and resurgence.

http://www.council.art/inquiries/1522/shoreline-movements

https://www.taipeibiennial.org/2020/en-US/Project/Screenings_Content/7

A Beast, a God, and a Line, MAIIAM contemporary art museum, Chiang Mai, Thailand, 14 Nov 2020 - 26 March 2021

MAIIAM Contemporary Art Museum is delighted to present the traveling exhibition A beast, a god, and a line, curated by Cosmin Costinas.

Exhibition period: 14th November 2020 - 26th March 2021

Participating Artists:
Ampannee Satoh, Anida Yoeu Ali, Anon Pairot, Antonia Aguilar, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Arnold Flores, Chandrakanth Chitara, Charles Lim, Christy Chow, Cian Dayrit, Daniel Boyd, Dilara Begum Jolly, Etan Pavavalung, Garima Gupta, Gauri Gill, Harit Srikhao, Huang Rui, Ines Doujak, INTERPRT, Jaffa Lam, Jakkai Siributr, Jakrawal Nilthamrong, Jimmy Ong, Jiun-Yang Li, Joël Andrianomearisoa, Joseph de Ramos, Joydeb Roaja, Jrai Dew Collective (curated by Art Labor), Khamsouk Keomingmuang, Lantian Xie, Lauro Penamante, Lavanya Mani, Malala Andrialavidrazana, Manish Nai, Ming Wong, Moelyono, Munem Wasif, Naiza Khan, Nguyễn Trinh Thi, Nontawat Numbenchapol, Norberto Roldan, Paphonsak La-Or, Paul Pfeiffer, Po Po, Raja Umbu, Rajesh Vangad, Rashid Choudhury, RJ Camacho, Sarah Naqvi, Sarat Mala Chakma, Sawangwongse Yawnghwe, Sheela Gowda, Sheelasha Rajbhandari, Simon Soon, Simryn Gill, Sopheap Pich, Su Yu Hsien, Sutthirat Supaparinya, Taloi Havini, Tawatchai Puntusawasdi, Than Sok, Thảo-Nguyên Phan, Trevor Yeung, Trương Công Tùng, Tuguldur Yondonjamts, Zamthingla Ruivah

The exhibition is organised by Para Site, Hong Kong. It was on view at Dhaka Art Summit, Dhaka, the Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw, as well as at The Secretariat (Pyinsa Rasa/TS1), Yangon throughout 2018, and previously at Kunsthall Trondheim, Norway in 2019

http://www.maiiam.com/exhibition/a-beast-a-god-and-a-line/

Mending the Sky, New Orleans Museum of Art, 10 October 2020 - 31 January 2021

Mending the Sky brings together eleven artists to respond to a world in distress. The exhibition borrows its title from a Chinese fable in which a rip in the sky causes the earth to split open, bringing floods, fires, famine, and disease—until a goddess takes on the arduous task of mending the broken sky. 

Working across the fields of art, animation, and performance, these artists shift conversations, challenge entrenched views, and subvert the established order. Their work gives shape to the aftermath of chaos and calamity, building towards a more equitable future by helping us envision the new world that might rise in the wake of disaster. Considering the crucial actions of care, healing, and coming together, each of them recognizes that we must address past problems and remedy present issues in order to forge a new path forward. With roots in Brazil, China, the Dominican Republic, Jamaica, Vietnam, India, Europe, and the American South, each of these artist projects are also acts of world-building that offer us a glimpse of a future we cannot yet see. 

Featured Artists

The exhibition begins with artist Beili Liu’s installation After All/Mending the Sky, in which raw silk clouds and dangling needles picture a sky in the act of repair. Firelei Báez’s painting the trace, whether we are attending to it or not (a space for each other’s breathing) overlays a ciguapa—a female creature from Dominican folklore—onto architectural plans of New Orleans, overwriting the divisive histories the map represents. Diedrick Brackens’s weaving If you feed a river mines the technique of weaving as a potent metaphor for new ways of imagining individual and cultural identity, incorporating influences drawn from European tapestries, West African textiles, and Southern quilting to explore issues surrounding gender, race, and sexuality. Heidi Hahn’s painting Burnout in Shredded Heaven 10 pictures two female figures, loosely based on poses of women from art history, in full possession of their own bodies and emotions, denying their viewers easy access to the world they inhabit. In A Sense of Memory, Ana Hernandez combines found wood, gifted objects, cast glass, and metal, finding in the patterns and forms nature models for greater harmony and balance between nature and people. Baseera Khan’s Braidrage is a video performance that explores the experience of overcoming trauma, based around a rock-climbing wall made from resin casts of parts of Khan’s body that the artist herself climbs. Thao Nguyen Phan’s three-channel video Mute Grain combines film and hand-drawn animation to tell the story of the death of a young woman named August during a famine in Vietnam, who haunts the landscape as a hungry ghost. In Jamilah Sabur’s video installation Un chemin escarpé / A steep path, the artist embodies a shape-shifting figure that communes with sites in the Caribbean to reimagine the surrounding landscape. Brazilian artist Clarissa Tossin’s Where the River Meets the Sea weaves together imagery from the world’s four largest rivers—the Amazon, the Nile, the Yangtze, and the Mississippi. Lorna Williams’s intricate sculptural assemblage of roots, everyday materials and cast plaster teeth, Lore, visualizes how our ancestors speak to us and through us: how our roots help form our identities and ways of being in the world.

https://noma.org/exhibitions/mending-the-sky/#about

Becoming Alluvium, Chisenhale gallery, London, 26 Sep - 6 Dec 2020

Extended Realities, 03-25.09.2020, Manzi Art Space, Hanoi, Vietnam

[PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ENGLISH]

‘Đây là ngày …
…thời gian lặp lại?’

Manzi Art Space và Viện Goethe trân trọng giới thiệu ‘Đây là ngày …thời gian lặp lại?’ – một triển lãm của 5 nghệ sĩ đương đại Việt Nam: Võ Trân Châu, Nguyễn Huy An, Phan Thảo Nguyên, Nguyễn Trinh Thi và Trương Công Tùng.

Triển lãm: 04- 25.09.2020 (10.00 tới 19.00 hàng ngày, trừ thứ Hai)
Manzi Exhibition Space, số 2 Ngõ Hàng Bún, Ba Đình, Hà Nội
Vào cửa tự do

Như tên gọi, chủ đề xuyên suốt của cả triển lãm là THỜI GIAN bởi mọi tác phẩm trong triển lãm này đều là những cách ‘đo’, ‘tìm’, ‘tạo lập’, ‘thu thập’ thời gian/lịch sử và ký ức khác nhau của các nghệ sĩ, dù vô tình hay có chủ ý, từ việc tạo dựng một cách kể mới, một cái nhìn đa chiều về những bi kịch con người qua tác phẩm sắp đặt mang tính phù du ‘Tơ giáp hạt’ của Phan Thảo Nguyên tới quá trình dệt lại ký ức – một nỗ lực nhằm tiếp cận các phần lịch sử còn mơ hồ với loạt tranh thêu và cắt ghép mosaic của Võ Trân Châu;

Thời gian cũng hiện diện trong tác phẩm Bài tập số 2 của Nguyễn Huy An như một vế của phương trình toán học - thể hiện mối tương quan giữa bóng của một tượng đài và mặt trời vào các thời điểm khác nhau trong ngày mà anh đề nghị người xem lập để chiêm nghiệm sự tương tác giữa tự nhiên và phi tự nhiên, và bằng cách đó, trao họ cơ hội suy ngẫm về con người, xã hội và thiên nhiên.

Ở loạt tranh ‘Khi thời gian trôi qua những cái bóng (1 2 3 4 ...)’ của Trương Công Tùng, thời gian, ánh sáng, bóng tối lại được dùng làm chất liệu. Với series tác phẩm khá mạnh về mặt thị giác này, Tùng đã thiết lập một lớp trần thuật mạch lạc về thời gian nhưng lại ngầm gây bối rối với những hình ảnh, thông tin đan xen giữa sự thật và hư cấu.

Tác phẩm ‘Mười một người đàn ông’ của Nguyễn Trinh Thi có lẽ là tác phẩm duy nhất trong triển lãm không chủ ý làm về lịch sử hay một tuyến tính thời gian cố định nào, nhưng Thi lại sử dụng các phim ít nhiều theo thứ tự thời gian, và vì vậy, một cách tự nhiên, tác phẩm của cô đã mở cho người xem cơ hội chiêm nghiệm và kết nối với các thời kỳ và mốc thời gian khác nhau của lịch sử Việt Nam.

‘Đây là ngày …thời gian lặp lại?’ sẽ mở cửa từ ngày 04 tới hết 26 tháng 9 năm 2020 tại không gian triển lãm của Manzi, số 2 Ngõ Hàng Bún. Vào cửa tự do.

Lưu ý: Để đảm bảo an toàn và sức khoẻ cho cộng đồng trong thời điểm này, triển lãm giới hạn 10 người xem/ một lượt. Khán giả nên đeo khẩu trang và rửa tay trước khi vào triển lãm.

Sự kiện thuộc chương trình nghệ thuật của Manzi do Viện Goethe hỗ trợ

Đối tác truyền thông: Hanoi Grapevine http://hanoigrapevine.com/

***
‘Extended Realities’ – a group exhibition at Manzi

Manzi Art Space and the Goethe Institut are pleased to present ‘Extended Realities’ – a group exhibition featuring works from five contemporary artists of Vietnam: Võ Trân Châu, Nguyễn Huy An, Phan Thảo Nguyên, Nguyễn Trinh Thi and Trương Công Tùng.

Exhibition: 04- 25.09.2020 (10.00am - 7.00pm, Tues to Sun)
Manzi Exhibition Space, No. 2 Ngõ Hàng Bún, Ba Đình, Hà Nội
Free Admission

Through a minimalist installation, a video art piece, an ephemeral installation and a series of 10 multimedia paintings, ‘Extended Realities’ examines how the artists are working with ideas of time, memory and history.

Drawing from literature, philosophy and daily life, artist Phan Thảo Nguyen observes ambiguous issues in social conventions and history. Nguyên’s work ‘Hunger Thread’ is part of her personal interpretation of the rarely discussed 1945 famine in Vietnam. This ephemeral installation consists of hundreds of raw jute balls scattered throughout the exhibition space. These jute balls can be blown away by the wind or kicked or stepped on by the viewers. In this work, the artist proposes a more nuanced approach to personal and historical tragedies using a new perspective on history and narration, and an artistic medium. Meanwhile, artist Võ Trân Châu recreates collective memories via her embroidery and mosaic artworks depicting long gone architectural structures or historical figures, in an attempt to access obscured or unwritten histories of Vietnam.

In contrast with Châu and Thảo Nguyên, artist Trương Công Tùng considers time as one medium for his series of paintings ‘The time of passing shadows (1 2 3 4...)’. In this intriguing series, Tùng sets out a layered narrative of time that is coherent yet tacitly perplexing, with images and information interleaved with fact and fiction

Time and history are always central themes in Nguyễn Huy An’s research. In this exhibition, Huy An presents a minimalist installation entitled ‘Exercise No. 2’ which forms part of his ongoing project inspired by the undeniable significance of Lenin as a political figure in the history of the country. The work is created following the artist’s study of the changing shadows of a public sculpture of Lenin over the course of one day, according to the time and position of the sun.

Nguyễn Trinh Thi’s practice as a moving image artist has consistently engaged with memory and history, and her work ‘Eleven Men’ is no exception. ‘Eleven Men’ is composed of scenes from a range of Vietnamese classic narrative films featuring the same central actress, Nhu Quynh. Spanning three decades of her legendary acting career, this multilayered work has created a personal connection with and contemplation of the complicated history of Vietnam.

‘Extended Realities’ will open from 04 to 26 Sep 2020 at Manzi, No. 2 Ngõ Hàng Bún. Admission in free.

Please note: In light of the current Coronavirus developments, we can only accommodate a maximum of 10 visitors per time slot at the exhibition. Visitors are requested to wear mask and wash hands before coming in.

The exhibition is part of Manzi’s Art Programme supported by Goethe-Institut Hanoi.

The inaugural A+ Online Festival of Video Art — 1 August to 12 September 2020

http://videoart.aplusart.asia/

The A+ Online Festival of Video Art follows Back to Art, an exhibition which marked the reopening of the A+ Works of Art Gallery in June, after an easing of the Movement Control Order in Malaysia.

Along with Back to Art, the Online Festival also aims to remind us that artworkers across the board—artists, curators, administrators, designers, writers and so on—have still been working through the pandemic, and they need support.

As the artworld shifts to more presentations online, we thought that one way to explore these possibilities would be through a focus on Video Art. An online festival of Video Art may arguably offer a more engaged experience in comparison to the now ubiquitous online viewing rooms of painting, sculpture and other works usually meant to be appreciated in person and in a gallery setting. Moreover, Video Art is a practice that could use much more backing from collectors, especially in Southeast Asia.

Rather than curate the Festival with an overall theme, we decided to invite four curators, each of whom we entrusted to present their own compelling and personal selections of artworks, which they have articulated in their separate curatorial statements. We also decided to include artists among our invited curators, and are showcasing their artworks as well.

—Lee Weng Choy, Festival Convenor

Monsoon Melody, 01 February – 16 August 2020, WIELS, Brussels

Thao Nguyen Phan’s works draw from the rich and turbulent history of her native country, Vietnam. The exhibition at WIELS – her largest to date – includes three videos accompanied by paintings: Tropical Siesta (2017), Mute Grain (2019) and Becoming Alluvium (2019). Taking different forms and starting points, these recent projects all explore the agricultural, political and social context of the Vietnamese rurality and countryside. However, Phan’s work transgresses a purely historical or political point of view, to incorporate an interest in literature and language. Through storytelling, fiction, official and unofficial history, it subtly reveals the forgotten and the forgettable in poetic recollections.

This exhibition is a project of the Han Nefkens Foundation, in collaboration with: Fundació Joan Miró (Barcelona), WIELS (Brussels), Chisenhale Gallery (London) and Galerie Zink (Waldkirchen). On this occasion, Phan’s first monograph will be co-published by the exhibition partners, the Han Nefkens Foundation and Mousse Publishing.

Special thanks to Fondation Thalie.

http://www.wiels.org/en/exhibitions/1261/Thao-Nguyen-Phan-Monsoon-Melody

Construction of Truths, 6 February – 17 May 2020, Museum of Contemporary Art and Design (MCAD), Manila,

Constructions of Truths asks us to reflect on the truths of images which populate our everyday lives and how these affect how we view the world. Artists included in the show present work using the projected image as a metaphor for how images are projected on us as viewers and how artists, through formal, aesthetic and narrative spaces, question these constructions.

The exhibition is a proposal to engage criticality from the audience, a way to negotiate the continually shifting perceptions of reality. To parse truthiness to reveal the conditions of truth in media, government, nonfiction, and elsewhere. We have come to accept with unquestioning confidence the authenticity of images. In a time when the image is never farther from the truth than it is closer to fiction, we have to be deeply aware of this shift in the ‘truth’ of the image. 

The 21st century’s digital turn has blurred the media of photography and film, producing the post-photographic image which is so altered through its various layers that the ‘original’ is no longer a matter of concern. For what is now the originating image?  When we are inundated with images everyday, what happens with our perception of the world and its realities? Are we able to distinguish realities from constructed ones? Are we able to reconcile what is believable and what is not?

The exhibition will include works by Martha Atienza, Minerva Cuevas, Luay Fadhil, Ramin Haerizadeh/Rokni Haerizadeh/Hesam Rahmanian, Shuruq Harb, Ho Tzu Nyen, Thao Nguyen Phan, Maria Taniguchi and James N. Kienitz Wilkins.

http://www.mcadmanila.org.ph/cot/

Dhaka Art Summit 2020, Seismic Movements, Dhaka, Bangladesh

Convening a critical mass of artists, thinkers and participants, ‘Dhaka Art Summit 2020: Seismic Movements’ (DAS 2020) will provoke us to reconsider (art) histories, movement, borders and fault lines. From 7–15 February 2020, Dhaka, Bangladesh will be the epicentre of a radical upheaval of how we think about art, activated by intellectual and curatorial contributions, spanning four floors of the Shilpakala Academy in the city’s vibrant University belt. Built through alliances across Africa, Australia, South and Southeast Asia (and also extending into Europe and the US) this platform will be free to the public and include contributions by 500 artists, scholars, curators and thinkers, in the form of panel discussions, performances and symposia as well as opportunities for participation from the 300,000+ visitors focused on one broad theme: what is a movement and how do we ignite one beyond the confines of an art exhibition?

https://www.dhakaartsummit.org/

A Beast, a God and a Line, 30.11 - 16.2 2020, Kunsthall Trondheim, Norway

Nabil Ahmed,  Anida Yoeu Ali,  Malala Andrialavidrazana,  Joël Andrianomearisoa,  Daniel Boyd,  Sarat Mala Chakma,  Chandrakant Chitara,  Rashid Choudhury,  Christy Chow,  Cian Dayrit,  Ines Doujak,  Gauri Gill,  Simryn Gill,  Sheela Gowda,  Garima Gupta,  Taloi Havini,  Huang Rui,  Dilara Begum Jolly,  Jrai Dew Collective (curated by Art Labor),  Jaffa Lam,  Jiun-Yang Li,  Charles Lim Yi Yong,   Lavanya Mani,  Moelyono,  Manish Nai,  Sarah Naqvi,  Nguyen Trinh Thi,  Jakrawal Nilthamrong,  Nontawat Numbenchapol,  Jimmy Ong,  Anand Patwardhan,  Etan Pavavalung,  Paul Pfeiffer,  Thao-Nguyen Phan,  Sheelasha Rajbhandari,  Joydeb Roaja,  Norberto Roldan,  Zamthingla Ruivah,  Ampannee Satoh,  Chai Siris,  Simon Soon (with RJ Camacho and Celestine Fadul),  Than Sok,  Su Yu Hsien,  Truong Công Tùng,  Raja Umbu,  Rajesh Vangad,  Munem Wasif,  Apichatpong Weerasethakul,  Ming Wong,  Lantian Xie,  Sawangwongse Yawnghwe,  Trevor Yeung,  Tuguldur Yondonjamts

Para Site and Kunsthall Trondheim are delighted to present A beast, a god, and a line in Trondheim, Norway. Curated by Cosmin Costinas, this expansive travelling exhibition is woven through the connections and circulations of ideas and forms across a geography commonly called Asia-Pacific. Arbitrary as any mapping, not least in contemporary art exhibitions, it could also be known by several other definitions, which the exhibition explores and untangles. The stories in A beast, a god, and a line journey on routes going back to several historical eras, starting from the early Austronesian world that has woven a maritime universe surpassed in scale only by European colonialism and is taken as the speculative and approximate geographical perimeter of this exhibition. Overlapping and sometimes conflicting or barely discernible beneath the strident layers of contemporaneity and the modern waves of destruction, these fluid worlds are still the pillars of a region that is going through a process of replacing its colonial cartographic coordinates, a process this exhibition proudly serves.

The exhibition is organised by Para Site, Dhaka Art Summit, and Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw. It was on view, throughout 2018, at all these institutions as well as at Pyinsa Rasa and TS1 at the Secretariat & Myanm/art Gallery in Yangon. The exhibition will be travelling to MAIIAM Contemporary Art Museum, Chiang Mai, in April 2020.

The iteration in Trondheim is organised by Kunsthall Trondheim and Para Site, Hong Kong.

Opaque Signs - A Fundraising Show by Sàn Art, 17 December 2019 — 22 January 2020, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

A Fundraising Show by Sàn Art
Location: Sàn Art
Millennium Masteri Unit B6.17 & B6.16
132 Bến Vân Đồn, Ward 6, District 4, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

“Opaque Signs” is a celebration of works graciously donated by Sàn Art’s artist-friends on the occasion of the organization’s twelfth year running. Though diverse in terms of forms, concepts and references, these gifts share a material element of luminosity. As store signs made of neon and LED lights proliferate across Vietnamese cities, light becomes a default symbol of pervasive commerce, of sleepless advertisement, of a permanent “on” mode of being, perennially open to transaction.

Radiance reaches further back into our modern obsession with sight. The rhetoric of illumination and clarity has long supported the human desire to see, to discover, to champion objectivity and reason, to extend the project of enlightenment, to expose zones of darkness, to rectify ravines of unreason.

Away from its associations with civilization, technocracy and global hyperconsumerism, the dazzle of modern light could be regarded alongside its dialectical opposite—the realm of the unexposed, the undisclosed, the self-veiled. Otherworlds of opacity and indefinability, with traces of unofficial histories and private observations, are activated around the blithe shine of the works. Across the gallery, presence and concealment fuse, glowing into a world of their own, where shadows tease and tempt, while relentlessly refusing, silver interpretation.

*

In this exhibition:

Ly Hoàng Ly repeats a pattern of sunken solidity, fabricating a threshold between stability and precarity / Trương Công Tùng transmits the unseeable from under the erosive shrouds of time / Đỉnh Q. Lê remixes revolutionary boilerplates with symbols of wealth in a sardonic sculpture-text / Orawan Arunrak meditates on the sacred light and routines that keep humans praying, wishing / Nguyễn Kim Tố Lan presents a faceless figure—a silhouette, a corpse, an apparition—floating across possibilities of reincarnation / Phan Thảo Nguyên embraces “dreadful optimism” on the wings of ideology and reveries / Nguyễn Phương Linh conjures an emptied nail salon, a menacing space of transformation / Richard Streitmatter-Trần proposes a perception of Saigon as a season where memories grow, wither, incessantly flicker / ƯuĐàm Trần Nguyễn sketches a terribly quiet scream, an elongated longing for somewhere unknown, a telegram for whom, who could know

*

Curation: Sàn Art
Design & Production: Nhật Q. Võ
Exhibition Text: Nguyễn Hoàng Quyên

Once again, a resonant thank-you to the artists who have supported our fundraiser, the generous humans who have either donated an existing artwork or submitted an idea (a sketch, a shape, a photograph, a line of text, a single word) for us to materialize into light.  

http://san-art.org/exhibition/opaque-signs/

Becoming Alluvium, Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona 16 November 2019 — 6 January 2020

As 2018 recipient of the Han Nefkens Foundation – LOOP Video Art Award, artist Thao Nguyen Phan will present Becoming Alluvium, an installation of video and painting at the Fundació Joan Miró in Barcelona, Spain, this autumn within the frame of LOOP Festival 2019.

The Han Nefkens Foundation has supported the production and presentation of this new work at the Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona as well as further presentations at the WIELS Contemporary Art Centre in Brussels and at the Chisenhale Gallery in London.

Thao Nguyen Phan’s Becoming Alluvium exhibitions will be accompanied by an illustrated publication. Designed by Ok Kyung Yoon, Curated by Hilde Teerlinck, edited by the Han Nefkens Foundation, and co-edited by Fundació Joan Miro, WIELS Contemporary Art Centre and Chisenhale Gallery with the support of Galerie Zink Waldkirchen. It is published and distributed by Mousse Publishing.

https://www.fmirobcn.org/en/exhibitions/5761/becoming-alluvium

Hugo Boss Asia Art 2019, Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai, Oct 18, 2019 - Jan 5, 2020

The Rockbund Art Museum together with HUGO BOSS hereby announce that an exhibition of artworks by finalists in the 2019 edition of the HUGO BOSS ASIA ART Award for Emerging Asian Artists will open on October 18, 2019 at the museum. 

The HUGO BOSS ASIA ART Award for Emerging Asian Artists since its inception in 2013 has encouraged and promoted new and diverse narratives in contemporary Asian art, while continuously reviewing and improving its own selection methodology. This year’s competition will employ the same process as last year’s, where finalists are carefully chosen from a list of names established by a multiregional group of nominators and a selection jury. Following from the deliberations of the nominating committee, the finalist artists of the fourth edition of the HUGO BOSS ASIA ART Award are: Hao Jingban(Mainland China), Hsu Che-Yu (Taiwan), Eisa Jocson (Philippines) and Thảo-Nguyên Phan (Vietnam).

From October 18, 2019 to January 5, 2020, an exhibition of works by the four finalists will be open to the public at the Rockbund Art Museum, curated by Billy Tang, Senior Curator of Rockbund Art Museum.The winner of the Award will be announced on November 6; the Award carries a stipend of RMB 300 000.

Since its inauguration in 2013, the “HUGO BOSS ASIA ART Award” represents a network of multiregional and multidisciplinary partners from all over Asia. Throughout significant societal, economic and cultural changes in Asia, it has played a role in critical developments in contemporary art and exhibition projects in the region.

http://www.rockbundartmuseum.org/en/exhibition/overview/166crsn 

Neither Black / Red / Yellow Nor Woman, 28 Sep 2019 – 4 Jan 2020, Times Art Center Berlin

CURATED BY NIKITA YINGQIAN CAI AND XIAOYU WENG

Participating Artists: Chang Wen-Hsuan, Dachal Choi, Chitra Ganesh, Jane Jin Kaisen, Iris Kensmil, Sylbee Kim, Mai Ling, Laura Huertas Millán, Sara Modiano, Mai-Thu Perret, Thao Nguyen Phan, Arin Rungjang, Shen Xin, Trinh T. Minh-ha, Evelyn Taocheng Wang, Wang Zhibo, Luka Yuanyuan Yang & Carlo Nasisse, Mia Yu

When Trinh T. Minh-ha published her significant text Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminismin 1989, some of the turbulent and transformative events of the world’s recent history were yet to happen, such as the end of the Cold War, the so-called East Asian Miracle, and the aggressive global expansion of identitarianism. But Minh-ha had already proposed a non-dualistic affirmation of women by stating: “The idea of two illusorily separated identities, one ethnic, the other woman (or more precisely female), again, partakes in the Euro-American system of dualistic reasoning and its age-old divide-and-conquer tactics.”[i] And her criticism of the paradigms of Western academic discourses reads as radical and prophetic in today’s milieu of sociopolitical divisions. 

Inspired by Minh-ha’s belief in the empowerment of writing and storytelling, the exhibition concept of Neither Black / Red / Yellow nor Woman departs from an imaginary encounter between three Asian women artists: Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (1951–1982), Pan Yuliang (1895–1977), and Trinh T. Minh-ha (b. 1952) in Paris sometime in 1979, and is informed by their works and archives. The stories of Yuliang, Theresa, and Minh-ha are exceptional stories about women who search for their voices as artists and struggle with their identity-impasse, while navigating through various cultural, geographical, and historical contexts. We question whether we could venture to say we are also Yuliang, Theresa, or Minh-ha, and whether there could have been empathy and resonance regardless of our different personal trajectories, cultural identifications, ideological positions, and understandings of gender.

The current crisis of identitarian politics manifests the antagonistic dichotomy that haunts our relationship with the past, present, and future, where life is often imagined in opposition and conflict. By retracing the transnational journeys of various female protagonists through the postcolonial memories before and after World War II and the regional chaos induced by ideological camps of the Cold War, we are able to see the reemergence of contradictory histories through the dissolution of the Eastern Bloc as paradoxes beyond the East/West divide. In view of curiosity and reflection, we envision the exhibition as a conversation that merges “them” with “us,” to speak in proximity with one another, and to form polyphony of cross-border storytellers. By juxtaposing historical materials with fictional constructs, we speculate beyond the categorization of gender and culture. Artists featured in this exhibition share a fluid state of mind and a diasporic mode of living and working. They respond to our questions with their own choices of conceptual personae and explore new dimensions of subjectivity and interrelation.

Neither Black / Red / Yellow Nor Womanis the first act of a trilogy that will unfold inthe future with multiple chapters in different institutions and geographies. The second act, The Mythic Being of Us,is inspired by Ursula K. Le Guin’s proposal to revive the collective usage of pronouns; humanistic portraits of woman poets, writers, filmmakers, activists, whistle-blowers, witches, gurus, ghosts, hackers, workers, and housewives will permeate the exhibition.The third act, Not a Manifesto but a Wish List,embraces solidarity while celebrating differences. A series of encounters will take place in performances and durational settings as in a theater or a parade, where poets, musicians, choreographers, and opera performers, among many others, are invited to take over the stage.

[i] Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), p. 104.

https://www.timesartcenter.org/neither-black/red/yellow-nor-woman