Landscape Series no. 1 presents landscape as a “quiet witness of history.” It began with searches of online archives of Vietnamese news-media, for images of figures in landscapes “pointing, to indicate a past event, the location of something gone, something lost or missing.” The uniformity is striking but the sequence is subtly structured: the typology hints at narrative progression, though of an uninformative narrative, lacking details.
Nguyen Trinh Thi is a moving image pioneer, not only within the landscape of contemporary art in Vietnam, but also broader South East Asia. Her training in journalism, photography and ethnographic studies anchors her artistic commitment to the essay film, a signature method of narrative that she explores in her investigation of perception, often re-working found footage into alternate historical tales of memory. Nguyen’s practice – embracing film, photography, installation and performance – engages various intelligences in its research: from indigenous farmer to shaman, from urbanite to rural farmer, from war archivist to sound specialist. Such interdisciplinary involvement reflects her keen social interest in the function of memory, particularly the presence of absence. In her investigation of: labor and its gendering; the archive and what it does not interpret; perception and the privileging of sight – Nguyen crafts specific tales of contest, her work reflecting a complex web of social relations that begs assumptions of value re-configured.
The Defining Artworks of 2023 – ARTnews.com Skip to main content By The Editors of ARTnews Plus Icon The Editors of ARTnews View All December 18, 2023 2:20pm Photo Illustration: Kat Brown/ARTnews Each year, countless new artworks are made and historical ones come into sharper focus as events in the art world and beyond give them new valance...
Reunion — Hand-Embroidered School Class Portraits - Photographs and text by Diane Meyer | LensCulture Feature Reunion — Hand-Embroidered School Class Portraits By obscuring the faces with embroidery — which would typically be the most important parts of these elementary school class portraits — otherwise overlooked details are brought into focus, such as body language and other embodiments of social convention...
For his project Book of Veles artist Jonas Bendiksen travelled to the small city of Veles in North Macedonia, inspired by a series of press reports starting in 2016, that revealed Veles as a major source of the fake news stories flooding Facebook and other social media sites celebrating Donald Trump and denigrating Hillary Clinton...
Air Con: Who Do You Want To Be When You Grow Up? | ArtsEquator Thinking and Talking about Arts and Culture in Southeast Asia ArtsEquator Viewpoints October 8, 2021 By Dhinesha Karthigesu (1,330 words, 5-minute read) Who do you want to be when you grow up? At the end of the play AIR CON , the character William (Nick Davis) asks the character Asif (Ryan Lee Bhaskaran) this question...
In 2019, Ayoung Kim traveled to Mongolia to research its widespread animistic belief system towards land, mother rock, stones, and sacred caves that purify human guilt...
Howardena Pindell on the Exclusion of Black Artists in the 1980s – ARTnews.com Skip to main content By Alex Greenberger Plus Icon Alex Greenberger Senior Editor, ARTnews View All January 14, 2021 1:13pm ©ARTnews Over the past several years, museums and galleries have made concerted efforts to show work by Black artists, responding to growing calls for equity...