Installation (Installation)

Good life (2007) is an installation displaying letters, documents, photographs and objects from a man named Joseph Carrier, and appropriated by artist Danh Vo. The installation features a series of small square vitrines, inset, dark and precisely spot-lit. Inside these are framed photographs, mostly black and white, of young Asian men, taken, as the titles on the neat brass name plates tell us, in Vietnam in the 1960s and early 1970s.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

The work “Les Fleurs d’intérieur” (which gives its name to the exhibiton presented at Kadist Art Foundation from May 30 to July 13, 2009) is a brass plate engraved with the inventory list of the works included in the show. From this moment, Dahn Vo will use this brass plates as a systematic element for all his exhibitions.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Fade In (the whole title of the film is actually the entire five page script) is a collaboration with the Danish artist collective Superflex (group of freelance artist–designer–activists committed to social and economic change, founded in 1993 by Jakob Fenger, Rasmus Nielsen and Bjørnstjerne Christiansen). There are several time layers to understand the story behind this film. In 1601, the San Jago set sail from Goa for Lisbon; the cargo included the first consignment of South East Asian porcelain destined for the European market.

Photography (Photography)

The American War , which takes its title from the Vietnamese term for what Americans call the Vietnam War, has toured the United States extensively with the goal of presenting a Vietnamese perspective of that history. The project began in 2005 when Fletcher visited the War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh City. He was shocked by images that depicted the lasting effects of the war and the atrocities committed by the United States.

Installation (Installation)

Palimpsest is a series of what artist Phi Phi Oanh calls “pictorial installations”. Lacquerscope is the name she has given to the lacquer projection machines that she created from lenses and old parts of small format film projectors. The name harkens back to the early age of mechanical reproduction that also coincides with the “invention” of Vietnamese lacquer painting in the last century.

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.

Photography (Photography)

Phan Quang’s portrait series Re/cover grapples with a lesser-known history in Vietnam. After World War II, many Japanese soldiers who fought in Vietnam stayed in the country. They married Vietnamese women, had children, and lived in the country until Japan recalled them home.

Photography (Photography)

Hill of Poisonous Trees (three men) (2008) exemplifies the artist’s signature photo-weaving technique, in which he collects diverse found photographs—portraits of anonymous people, stills from blockbuster films, or journalistic images—cuts them into strips, and weaves them into new composition. The title of the series is translated from the Khmer phrase Tuol Sleng , which literally means a poisonous hill or a place on a mound to keep those who bear or supply guilt, and the photographs came from the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum in Cambodia, a former prison where at least 200,000 Cambodians were executed during the reign of the Khmer Rouge between 1975 and 1979. In this particular image, three men stand against the backdrop of what looks like a prison interior.

Painting (Painting)

In the “Black Paintings” series, although the human body is only suggested, it plays an important role. Some body parts are absent, mostly the faces which are usually an affirmation of the individual. The characters recall ghosts testifying as to the traumas of war.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Slow Graffiti was produced for Da Corte’s exhibition at the Vienna Secession in 2017. The video is a shot-for-shot remake of the film “The Perfect Human” by Danish filmmaker Jørgen Leth (1967). The original is narrated in an anthropological manner, or as if listening to a guide at a zoo, but Da Corte’s version is stranger and more philosophical.

Photography (Photography)

In Extra Curriculum Political Science Class 7/1972 , a group of women walk bare-foot and single file towards Dat Mui Mangrove in Ca Mau Province to attend ‘political science class’. These women wear headdress to protect their identities because they are spies placed strategically in the South by the Viet Cong. These classes of the ‘National Liberation Front for Southern Vietnam’ took place in the mangrove swamp in makeshift wooden huts where they would learn more of the political points of view of their forces and the changes in military situations across the country.

Photography (Photography)

In Mobile Military Medical Clinic 9/1970 , a stretcher carrying an injured solider is being carried through swamp-land towards a makeshift operation table.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

SUPERFLEX makes a distinction between two types of projects with different temporalities: works that occur during an exhibition and other that evolved over several years. Thus, since 1997, they are working on a biogas system (SUPERGAS), first installed in Kenya, then Thailand and today in Mexico, perfecting at each stage the means of production, utilization and commercialization of this system. GUARANA POWER is one of these sustainable projects that create a real economy.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Filmed underwater, this is the third video in Nguyen-Hatsushiba’s “Memorial Project” series which began in 2001. The title already implies the cultural complexities about to be ironically unravelled: Ho Chi Minh is parodied and Okinawa (where this was filmed) was a battle site in Japan during World War II which then became an American training base during the Vietnam War. To a remix of James Bond movie tracks composed by Quoc Bao, no less than thirty divers in wet suits and full gear advance against the water resistance armed with cartridges of color.

Installation (Installation)

On September 22, 1940 the French signed an accord, which granted Japanese troops the right to occupy Indochina. The Japanese presence in Indochina lasted until the end of World War II and during the occupation, jute supplies from India were interrupted. Jute was used to make sacks as well as gunpowder, a crucial material for the war industry.

This work presents the image of an immolated monk engraved on a baseball bat. The flames surround him eroding the extremity of the bat. The delicate sculpture refers to the sacrifice of the Buddhist monk, Thich Quang Duc, who immolated himself on June 16th 1963, in reaction to the discrimination and the repressive politics of the Diem Catholic regime (regime installed by the Americans) towards the Buddhists.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Modelled and rendered in 3D, Moving Target Shadow Detection by Sung Tieu reconstructs the entire interior of the Hotel Nacional de Cuba in Havana, the site of the first-known instance of a supposed sonic attack, which collectively became known as ‘Havana Syndrome’. First reported by CIA staff in the Cuban capital in 2016, the syndrome includes a range of unexplained disorders ranging from nausea, fatigue and memory loss to brain injuries resembling concussions. In Tieu’s film, CCTV camera footage and images taken by a nano drone lead from the hotel’s lobby to an occupied hotel room, where the viewer is confronted with classified documents and news reportages of the recent Havana Syndrome attacks around the world.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

For Immersion , Harun Farocki went to visit a research centre near Seattle specialized in the development of virtual realities and computer simulations. One of their projects consists in using virtual reality (environments created to simulate this world) for therapeutic reasons for soldiers suffering traumas after the Iraq war. The double projection creates a parallel between animations and testimonies by soldiers reliving their mission, the explosions, gunshots and ambushes, their fears and their guilt.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Wheat Mollah ( 2011) is one of Slavs and Tatars composite object. The title Wheat Mollah has various interpretations, from “master” or spiritual authority for Shiites and “friend” for Sunnis. The turban is also worn in a diversity of cultures and religions in Africa, Asia and India.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

There is no there by Gabriella and Silvana Mangano is a black and white looped video with sound, in conjunction with a live performance. The work is inspired by the Blue Blouse, a political propaganda theater movement which spread across the Soviet Union in the mid-1920s. More specifically, the work takes the form of ‘Living Newspapers’, which were performances based on topical news events.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Les Chenilles by Michelle and Noël Keserwany is a sensual film that translates the source of women’s oppression into the means for their liberation. In this narrative film, protagonists Asma and Sarah meet while working as waitresses in France. They both come from the Levant and, each in their own way, carry burdens of the past and the consequences of colonialism.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Jonas Van and Juno B’s video work Kebranto is anchored by the figure of Boitatá, a snake that is part of the imaginary Guaraní communities that live between the current nation-states of Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, and Uruguay. The mythical figure Boitatá is a protector of jungles and forests. In GuaraníBoitatá is the union of two words: Mbói (snake) and tatá (fire).

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Many of Chaves and Gilda’s works use recycled cardboard. For Partituras, they arranged stacks of cardboard into long rectangles on the ground, which are visually analogous to fields of graphite in Chaves’s pencil drawings. While the blocks have a spare presence in space, they exist more full solidity within their borders, and the recycled nature of the cardboard adds some play into the clean minimalist rectangles and cubes.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

In Tapitapultas (2012), Donna Conlon and Jonathan Harker comment on mass consumerism and pollution by way of a game they invented. The artists used disposable spoons as catapults to shoot thousands of plastic bottle caps at a hole in a concrete platform. The platform was once part of a U. S. military installation in the Panama Canal Zone, and it is now an observation deck in a nature park.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Letters of the Greek alphabet glisten on a black background. When a letter appears, there is a sound. Each letter corresponds to a star in the sky.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Addressing the legacy of colonialism, The Guestbook by Musquiqui Chihying and Gregor Kasper is a slow-paced, black-and-white film exploring the German colony of Togoland, now the Republic of Togo. The guestbook in question—a thin, battered copy that Do Do, the Togolese protagonist of the film, finds in Berlin’s State Library—is filled with the signatures of colonial-era explorers. The plot follows Do Do as he seeks out Treptower Park, where the JAZZ musician Kwassi Bruce was once exhibited in a human zoo in the first German Colonial Exhibition.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

DADYAA: The Woodpeckers of Rotha by Pooja Gurung and Bibhusan Basnet illuminates a unique and seldom seen international perspective on indigenous cultures and contemporary social issues in the Nepali context. A small masterpiece, the work engages with one of the most pressing social issues in Nepal, mass migration and the dissolving of social fabric in rural areas. The story begins with an old couple, Atimaley and Devi, who live in a village in Jumla, in the highlands of Western Nepal.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Jay Chung and Q Takeki Maeda remake a clip from the 1970s they found on the internet, and without really changing this archive material, displace it by imitating the staging and the acting with scrupulous precision. The slightest details are reproduced identically with great minutiae. The facial expressions are absurd, the prim attitude makes no sense.

Painting (Painting)

Nepal and China signed an agreement for the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in 2017. The BRI is a strategy that was set forth by China in 2013 to expand its influence by building a network of economic corridors around the globe. BRI projects in Nepal include the Kathmandu-Kerung Railway, the Galchhi-Rasuwagadhi-Kerung 400 kilovolt transmission line, the 762 megawatt Tamor hydroelectric dam, and the 426 megawatt Phukot Karnali run-of-the-river hydropower project.

Photography (Photography)

Au non de la liberté (Tiko drink Kumba drunk) is a photographic series by Zacharie Ngnogue and Chantal Edie that considers the correlation between those who hold power in Cameroon and how their actions affect the populations they rule in often compromising ways. “Tiko drink-Kumba drunk” is an adage that is commonly used in the Southwest province of Cameroon to speak of how one’s actions affect others. Civil liberties are next to non-existent in Cameroon, the law is lawless, and structured in a way that is intended to attack its citizens’ human rights.