In the upcoming events of the "Around the World in 80 Days: Artists Films / Moving Image", we're please to showcase the contemporary practices in moving image art by the Vietnamese artists.

In this program, we'll screen and talk to two artists - Tuan Mami and Nguyen Phuong Linh -- whose recent installation works have used video and moving image in substantial ways:

1. "Memory of the Blind Elephant" (Nguyen Phuong Linh, 2016, 14:25)

2. "Trùng mù" (Endless, Sightless) (by Phuong Linh Nguyen, 14', 2018)

3. "In One’s Breath—Nothing Stands Still" (by Tuan Mami, 30', 2018)

4. Discussion with the artists and their crew members.

On the works:

1. "Memory of the Blind Elephant" follows the social and geographic transformation of the ex-colonial rubber plantations in Central and Southern Vietnam. The rubber trees, human beings, animals and land all bear the quiet evidence of a complex history.

2. Trùng Mù (Endless, Sightless) begins with two figures behind a curtain patterned with foliage: a feminized cyborg is bent over another body to engage in some facial operation. Their interaction is accompanied by the repetitive sound of a laser machine for the removal of dark pigmentation in the human skin, which sound binds the visual and temporal movements of the whole film. Oscillating between different intensities of blurring, blinding, and obfuscating the images it creates, the video drama by Phuong Linh Nguyen slowly unfolds a generic and timeless space of cosmetic technology. From the choreography of textiles and textures, of material and gaseous states, of human and non-human bodies, the beauty salon emerges as a manifestation of capitalist corpofiction, migrant labor, and global toxic bonds. (from text by Susa Husse)

3. "In One’s Breath—Nothing Stands Still": Tuan Mami has spent the last five years visiting and documenting his parents’ hometown in northeastern Vietnam, a mountain village that has become almost unlivable due to extractive limestone mining. The film is a poetic portrayal, one drawing from indigenous spiritual and Buddhist beliefs, of a landscape choked by toxic dust from the mining. It offers a fictional account of a spirit’s three-day journey to the “other side,” as a ghost story that suggests a place caught between life and death.


On the artists:

1. Nguyễn Phương Linh:

Phuong Linh is a Hanoi-based conceptual artist. Her multidisciplinary practice spans installation, sculpture, and video. Her work conveys the sense of the alienation, dislocation, and ephemerality of human life. Linh’s concerns deal with geographic cultural shifts, the traditional roots, and fragmented history of Vietnam – its complex nexus of ethnicities, religions, and cultural and geo-political influences. On her frequent travels, Nguyen Phuong Linh does field research and collects artifacts from borders and historical sites of exchange. She transforms these materials in order to construct alternative perspectives of and interpretations on fragmented histories and personal narratives.

2. Tuấn Mami:

Born in 1981 and graduated from the Vietnam University of Fine Arts in 2006, Tuấn Mami is a Hanoi-based multidisciplinary artist whose practice spans across installation, video, performance and conceptual art. Constantly exploring new methods of expression, Tuấn Mami burst into the international art scene for his daring, and increasingly meditative experimentations in both private and public spaces, analyzing the condition of human encounters (with each other and with the world around them) and critiquing the current state of society; while also attempting to shift or change (the perception of) this state. Other than being as a creator, Tuấn also participates and contributes greatly in the development of the local art scene, founding the mobile art centre MAC-Hanoi in 2012, and co-founding Nhà Sàn Collective in 2013; while performing as Visiting Faculty at the San Francisco Art Institute in the same year. He has participated in numerous exhibitions, art events and residencies, both at home and abroad including ‘Skylines with Flying people 3’ (Hanoi, 2014-2016), ‘In.Visible Borderline’ (MetaHouse Art Space, Phnom Penh, Cambodia, 2016), ‘Krisis’ (Bonington Gallery, Nottingham, UK, 2016), ‘Plastic Myths’ (Asia Culture Center, Gwangju, South Korea, 2015) etc.

On the program:

The screening and artist talk is a part of Hanoi DocLab's "ImageLab 2018" project sponsored by the Cultural Development and Exchange Fund (CDEF) of the Danish Embassy in Vietnam.