Home (good infinity, bad infinity)
2018 - Film & Video (Film & Video)
13:46 minutes
Lêna Bùi
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.
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.
Colors:
Related works sharing similar palette
© » KADIST
Prabhakar Kamble
2022To produce the series of sculptures collectively titled Utarand , Prabhakar Kamble relocated his studio to Kolhapur, Maharashtra, near the village where he was born into a family of daily wage earners...
© » KADIST
Enrique Ramirez
2017Ramirez’s The International Sail is the fifth in a series that features an upside-down worn out, mended and fragmented boat sail...
© » ARTS EQUATOR
Weekly Southeast Asia Radar: Vietnam's post-war writers; Burmese voices in book | ArtsEquator Thinking and Talking about Arts and Culture in Southeast Asia ArtsEquator Radar BACC October 8, 2020 ArtsEquator’s Southeast Asia Radar features articles and posts about arts and culture in Southeast Asia, drawn from local and regional websites and publications – aggregated content from outside sources, so we are exposed to a multitude of voices in the region...
© » KADIST
Calderón & Piñeros (La Decanatura)
2018Calderón & Piñeros (La Decanatura) refer to Sólheimasandur as a work that tackles the issue of “the ruin as a tourist destination.” As they say, “at the end, tourists become an essential part of this unusual, beautiful, and—at the same time—banal landscape.” The video features a plane wreck on Sólheimasandur beach in Iceland, where a navy plane belonging to the United States Army crashed in 1973 due to fuel exhaustion...
© » LENS CULTURE
Whispers - Photographs by Yuanbo Chen | Text by Magali Duzant | LensCulture Feature Whispers A multi-layered approach to visual storytelling — a conversation, a portrait, and a detail of a personal object or a place — captures the shared experiences of Chinese citizens coping with isolation while abroad during the Covid lockdown...
© » ARTS EQUATOR
Weekly Picks: Malaysia (26 Nov – 2 Dec 2018) | ArtsEquator Thinking and Talking about Arts and Culture in Southeast Asia Weekly To Do November 26, 2018 Symposium – How Easily Modernism Could Be Disturbed , at ILHAM Gallery, 1 Dec, 10am–6:30pm A symposium in conjunction with the Latiff Mohidin: Pago Pago (1960–1969) exhibition in the gallery...
© » KADIST
Lu Pingyuan
2016Masterpiece in the Water by Lu Pingyuan tells the story of an impatient collector who is killed by an artist...
© » KADIST
Joana Hadjithomas & Khalil Joreige
Rocket Society refers to a space project led by a group of Armenian researchers at the beginning of the 1960s...
© » ARTS EQUATOR
ILHAM Gallery is a trailblazer in the Malaysian art scene (via Luxuo) | ArtsEquator Thinking and Talking about Arts and Culture in Southeast Asia ArtsEquator Radar June 19, 2018 ILHAM Gallery sits like a secret jewel box in the black-ice exterior of Menara ILHAM, where it has played host to celebrated artists and conceptual experimenters since it opened its doors in August 2015...
![Museum directors union, [Artoons, 2008–2022 series]](https://kadist.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/Museum-directors-union.png)
© » KADIST
Pablo Helguera
A sly sense of humor is key in Pablo Helguera’s long-running Artoons series, one that includes ~1500 drawings made over ten years...
© » ARTEFUSE
Art Basel reveals 287 leading galleries and expanded city-wide program for its 2024 edition in Basel, Switzerland (News) - ArteFuse Art Basel reveals 287 leading galleries and expanded city-wide program for its 2024 edition in Basel, the first led by the show’s new Director Maike Cruse With 287 premier galleries from 40 countries and territories, Art Basel will once again bring together the international art world at its marquee fair in Basel, Switzerland...