Home (good infinity, bad infinity)

2018 - Film & Video (Film & Video)

13:46 minutes

Lêna Bùi

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Home (good infinity, bad infinity) by Lêna Bùi sheds light on the experiences of those who live along, and on, the waterways of Saigon, Vietnam and Sharjah, United Arab Emirates. Vietnam is a tropical country of major sand extraction; the UAE a desert country of major land reclamation. Scenes of the Saigon river being heavily eroded due to industrial machines mining sand for construction of skyscrapers are interspersed with images of concrete jungles, and aerial views of Saigon and Sharjah varying in scale and style. Waterways here are material resources but also conduits of trade, as boats of all-purpose move and dock within each city’s ports. Humans live within these industrializing landscapes, in one context seemingly squeezed out of the bounds of a city whose ‘progress’ has designed space assuming ‘one size fits all’; and in the other, generationally at odds with a youth whose attitudes towards cosmopolitan cities struggles with the desire of its elders to enliven cultural traditions. This work continues the artist’s investigation of the geopolitics of water in differing cultural contexts, revealing the everyday impact of globalizing processes of extraction and its environmental and social ramifications.

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Lêna Bùi engages our perception and relationship to the natural world that we intrinsically rely on and belong to. She asks us to think deeper of our spiritual and physical understanding of what is good and bad, useful and useless, and of what is assumed natural by marketable standards versus what is natural in nature, in order to reveal the social impact of such attitudes on producers and consumers. Spanning painting, drawing, video, film and sculpture, her works are often made in collaboration with a particular community (from farmers to scientists, from shamans to mothers and more), connecting rural and urban contexts that benefit from little comparative studies otherwise. Lêna Bùi’s work seeks to challenge and broaden our assumptions about the impact of human progress and to reveal the endurance and resilience of cultural practices confronted with the industrializing demands of a capitalist economy.

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Colors:

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• industry.n.01
• geopolitics.n.01
• environmental.a.02
• landscape.n.01
• advancement.n.03
• globalization.n.01