Sights and Sounds: Vietnam
Sights and Sounds: Vietnam features new work by Nguyen Trinh Thi, The Propeller Group, UuDam Tran Nguyen, and Pham Ngọc Lân, selected by Zoe Butt.
Are there values that are common to a global community? These artists ponder the crucial relationship between context and action and reflect on the way history generalizes or overlooks the voices of the disempowered. Artists face unique challenges in Vietnam, where they are closely surveilled and stories of the past are often heavily edited by the Communist bureaucracy. They nevertheless incisively confront the experience of military control, the poetic conversion of the past into popular myth or subcultural stereotype, and the power of broadcast and print media in the sleight of hand by which fiction is transformed into fact.
Zoe Butt
Curator
Zoe Butt (b. Newcastle, Australia, 1976) is Executive Director and Curator of Sàn Art in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam’s most active nonprofit, artist-initiated, independent contemporary art space. She was previously Director of International Programs at the Long March Project, Beijing (2007–9) and Assistant Curator of Contemporary Asian Art at the Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane (2001–7).
About Sights and Sounds: Global Film and Video
This long-term series offers a rotating selection of vigorous film and video works by contemporary artists from around the world — with a particular emphasis on work being made outside western Europe and the United States.
Sights and Sounds: Global Film and Video is a long-term presentation of new film and video works made in the sphere of the visual arts. The series offers a rotating selection of vigorous works by contemporary artists from around the world. It introduces New York audiences to the latest developments in filmmaking within the art context and underlines the Jewish Museum’s holistic and global approach to the understanding and presentation of art and culture.
Sights and Sounds takes advantage of the straightforward way film and video travel: shipped on discs or streamed online, these works provide an instant connection to new creative practices from even the most remote locations.
Twenty-five international curators have selected new film and video work from their respective regions of the world—ranging from Argentina to Vietnam, Nigeria to Romania, New Zealand to China, and many places in between. Their picks are screened for one month each in the museum’s media center, which has been turned into a miniature cinema for the occasion.
The works in Sights and Sounds touch on themes significant to both Jewish culture and universal human experience: spirituality, exile, language, conflict, family, humor, history. The series creates a broad network of artistic expression and curatorial perspectives that takes stock of what is happening in film and video art at this moment in time across the globe—with a particular emphasis on work being made outside western Europe and the United States.
Sights and Sounds will culminate with a selection of highlights from the series. One work from each country will be presented in the gallery from February 5, 2016 to June 30, 2016.
Jens Hoffmann
Deputy Director
Exhibitions and Public Programs
Installation view of Sights and Sounds: Global Film and Video in the Goodkind Media Center. Photo by David Heald.
Exhibition highlights
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Nguyen Trinh Thi, Landscape Series #1, 2013, video, sound, 5 min. Artwork © Nguyen Trinh Thi, provided by the artist
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The Propeller Group, The Dream, 2012, video, 4 min., 20 sec. Artwork © The Propeller Group, provided by the artist
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UuDam Tran Nguyen, Waltz of the Machine Equestrians—The Machine Equestrians, 2012, video, sound, 3 min. Artwork © UuDam Tran Nguyen, provided by the artist
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Pham Ngọc Lân, The Story of Ones, 2011, video, sound, 9 min., 18 sec. Artwork © Pham Ngọc Lân, provided by the artist
