Exhibition
Tuan Andrew Nguyen: Radiant Remembrance
06/29/23-09/17/23
Conversations · Exhibition-Related · Exhibition-Related
Screening and Conversation with Tuan Andrew Nguyen
Cover Image:
Tuan Andrew Nguyen. Courtesy Tuan Andrew Nguyen and James Cohan, New York. Photo: Harry Vu; Vivian Crockett. Photo: Ciara Elle Bryant
Tuan Andrew Nguyen presents a screening of his film The Unburied Sounds of a Troubled Horizon (2022), followed by a conversation between the artist and curator Vivian Crockett.
Featured in the exhibition “Tuan Andrew Nguyen: Radiant Remembrance,” Unburied Sounds exemplifies how Nguyen reworks dominant narratives through personal memory, the historical charge of objects, and speculative or spiritual practices. Set in Quảng Trị, a heavily bombarded area during the war in Vietnam, the film follows a woman named Nguyêt who runs a scrapyard business and builds beautiful hanging sculptures from the remnants of munitions and unexploded ordnances. With the help of a spiritual medium and monks, Nguyêt realizes that she is the reincarnation of Alexander Calder (1898—1976), the American sculptor and an outspoken critic of the Vietnam War. In this film, Nguyen questions how the idea of reincarnation and the reappearance of an artistic impulse in another time, place, and individual might destabilize the way we think about progress in art and history.
After a brief introduction, theater doors will close at 6:45 p.m. for the screening.
Screening:
Tuan Andrew Nguyen, The Unburied Sounds of a Troubled Horizon, 2022. 58:00 min.
A recording of this conversation can be found on our YouTube channel and below:
Accessibility
Live CART captioning will be provided for this program by StenoCaptions.
American Sign Language interpretation for public programs is available free of charge upon request with three weeks’ advance notice.
For all accessibility questions or requests, please contact publicprograms@newmuseum.org.
About the Speakers
Tuan Andrew Nguyen (b. 1976, Saigon, Vietnam; he/him) is an artist whose work utilizes strategies of remembrance to highlight unofficial and suppressed histories. Interweaving the factual and the speculative and often employing mythologies of otherworldly realms, Nguyen’s films re-work dominant narratives into stories that propose creative forms of healing the intergenerational traumas of colonialism, war, and displacement. Through his interest in animism and material memory, the affective and historical charge embedded into objects, Nguyen’s installations and sculptural practice coincide with and expand on the themes explored in his films.
Vivian Crockett (she/her) is Curator at the New Museum and a Brazilian-American scholar focusing largely on modern and contemporary art of African diasporas, Latinx diasporas, and the Americas at the varied intersections of race, gender, and queer theory. At the New Museum, she has curated “Doreen Lynette Garner: REVOLTED” (2022) and “Screens Series: Zahy Guajajara” (2022) and co-curated the Museum’s landmark solo exhibition “Wangechi Mutu: Intertwined” (2023).
Sponsors
Support for Education and Public Engagement programs is provided, in part, by public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature, and from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.
We gratefully acknowledge the Bowery Council of the New Museum for its support of Education and Public Engagement Programs.
Endowment support is provided by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund; the Skadden, Arps Education Programs Fund; and the William Randolph Hearst Endowed Fund for Education Programs at the New Museum.
Support for “Tuan Andrew Nguyen: Radiant Remembrance” can be viewed here.
