Photography (Photography)

Untitled is a black-and-white photograph of a wave just before it breaks as seen from the distance of an overlook. Donnelly’s interest in the waveform–visually, aurally, and perceptually–is made manifest in works across multiple media, including photography, drawing, video, sculpture, and performance.

Textile (Textile)

Risham Syed discovered a box of woven Chinese silk panels that was her mother’s most prized possession. Her mother had long talked about making quilts with these panels; there were many questions about what she would do with so many panels, which were ultimately used to compose Risham Syed’s work Ali Trade Center Series IV (with Buddleia) . After her mother’s death, Syed began to explore the history of this fabric as a material linked to commerce, power, social class, and culture, and thus linked to a history of violence, hardship, upheaval, and conflict.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The essay film How to Improve the World by Nguyen Trinh Thi takes us into an indigenous village of the Jrai people in the Central Highlands of Vietnam, in Gia Lai province. It begins with sound – perhaps a hammer, or a gong – the lack of image making its identification difficult. A landscape emerges of an open field where a farmer tends his grazing cow herd.

Installation (Installation)

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.