Alternating Waves: Imaging the Archive, The Outpost 24 Nov – 10 December 2023

ALTERNATING WAVES: IMAGINE THE ARCHIVE
The Outpost & Á Space, Hanoi, Vietnam
24 November – 10 December 2023

Nhà Sàn Collective, with The Outpost Art Organisation and Á Space, presented a program of discussions, as a part of Well Settled project with An Việt Archive. Come to meet Hanoi based artists, curators, architects, to experience artistic documentation and explore artistic experimentation in moving image works, performance art and architecture, and their relations to archives. The program consists of four events in two different locations, during the last two months in 2023 in Hanoi.

The presentations include screening of my film ‘The Scattered Body or A World Unclouded by Dust together with other works by Moi Tran, and Nhà Sàn Collective and friends realised during the Well Settled project.

Curator talk with Nguyễn Quốc Thành at The Outpost
Installation shot The Scattered Body or A World Unclouded by Dust (George Clark, 2023) at The Outpost

Programme:

#ALTERNATING WAVES, a talk with curator Nguyễn Quốc Thành
Friday 24 Nov, The Outpost

A discussion about new video and sound works by George Clark, Moi Tran, and Nhà Sàn Collective and their friends. Dances and systems of archives. A voice and waves. A music composition, a visual channel. The artworks propose to engage with archives through moving image and sound. But shifting from physical materiality into electronic waves, are there boundaries between archives and art?

#IN : ACT 2023, a proposal of performance art from curator Vũ Đức Toàn, with other participating artists
Saturday 25 Nov, Á Space

The proposal starts with the question on the conventional form of performance art, whereas the body is considered both as material and medium. Having said that, based on a long-standing local understanding of the embodiment of both physical life form and the soul in one body, could the body already have an inherent capacity for archiving?

#A BODY, AN ARCHIVE: a talk with artist/curator Vũ Đức Toàn
Sunday: 3 Dec 2023, The Outpost

Questions about the body and body language initiated Vu Duc Toan’s proposal, challenging the notion of actions that are still considered critical in performance art. When a performance begins, it unfolds in front of the audience a scene that encompasses not only actions but also bodies: the artist, space, spectators, objects, and the intangible entities stemming from performance acts. If the body is also a repository, then where, how, and what kind of records do artists or viewers can access? The physicality of the body, the performance act itself, or the camera recording it, which of these holds the archive?

#Space of architecture, space of archive: talk with architect Mai Hưng Trung, Hanoi Ad Hoc
Sunday, 10 Dec 2023, The Outpost

Cheap motel rooms are designed to look like family bedrooms. Daring expansions in socialist housing complexes. Re-imagination of villager identity and communal living in an urban setting. The project “Hanoi Ad Hoc 2.0 // Dwelling in the Flow” is concerned with creative adaptation and open-mindedness, transformations regarding forms, programs, and cultures occurring within the heart of Hanoi. Somewhere in the continuously evolving living spaces, individual and collective memories are preserved. Could it be that these adaptations and customization themselves are lines of archive data?

About the project
Commissioned by An Việt Archive – the largest known British-Vietnamese community archive in the UK, the project proposes to explore the archive through the medium of moving image and sound. This approach suggests the experience of physical materials such as printed matters, books, and objects located in An Viet as a shift into an electronic realm. The commissioned artworks present archives as materials that need to be taken apart, felt by touch, presence to be known through bodies and space. Objects, living spaces, bodies, and body movements are the objects of the recording camera, transformed into symbols and sounds. They too are forms of living archives, already existing systems of memory. This two-way and parallel shift occurs between archive and art practices.

In Vietnam, the program is organized to present new directions in artistic practices of George Clark, Moi Tran, Nhà Sàn Collective and friends, through discussions with artists/curators Nguyễn Quốc Thành, Vũ Đức Toàn and architect Mai Hưng Trung. A part of the project is a broadcast commission ‘Amplifying Archives’ by Cường Minh Bá Phạm, Trà My Hickin, Koa Phạm, Stefan Nielsen, Nic Annette Miller, and Thierry Phung, as result of a larger year-long project to develop new tools for accessing, activating and sharing the collection and shared heritage.

In the UK, ‘Well Settled‘, a parallel exhibition is taking place in Lux Moving Image, London, 4 November – 16 December 2023.

The projects are commissioned by An Việt Archives, supported by the British Council as part of the UK/Vietnam Season 2023 and Hackney Archives, LUX, The Outpost, Nhà Sàn Collective, Á Space and the University of Westminster. Changing Waves program is part of the UK/Vietnam Season 2023 to celebrate the 50th anniversary of diplomatic relationships between Vietnam and the UK, and the 30th anniversary of the British Council in Vietnam.

‘Well Settled’ opens at LUX, 4 Nov – 16 December

LUX, London
4 November – 16 December 2023
Well Settled Exhibition with Nhà Sàn Collective, Moi Tran, George Clark and Lưu Chữ
18 December ‘Amplifying Archives’ launch with Cường Minh Bá Phạm, Trà My Hickin, Koa Phạm, Stefan Nielsen, Nic Anette Miller and Thierry Phung

Well Settled is an exhibition of new commissioned works responding to the An Việt Archives presented as part of the British Council UK/Vietnam Season 2023. The exhibition presented a series of commissioned works from artists in both the UK and Vietnam, proposing new models for how archives and shared heritage can be activated and made accessible. The exhibition features new works from Nhà Sàn Collective, Moi Tran, George Clark and Lưu Chữ presented for the first time and launch of new audio project Amplifying Archives.

Well Settled opening 4th November 2023
Installation shot The Scattered Body or A World Unclouded by Dust (George Clark, 2023)

The exhibition featured by film ‘The Scattered Body or A World Unclouded by Dust’ explores fragmented histories and the invisible work to care for archival objects from a Vietnamese community archive in Hackney to a state film archive in Hanoi. Moving through the archives and their systems of care, the body is both a material and medium to explore the multiple lives of archival objects, the spaces that contain them and the ecstatic labour that sustains them. 

The film was shown alongside two new works: Nhà Sàn Collective‘s Night of the 30th / Đêm Ba Mươia a new moving image work filmed at the residence of Mr. Manh Duc, a home in close proximity to the collective and their community of artist friends for many years. In thise playground, a mystical world emerges; a cinema is reenacted. As the film unfolds, a river, a garden, spirits, wooden structures, people and, objects appear, dissolve and reappear, as if they were characters morphing into one another. The film draws attention to cinematic transformation of physical and immaterial beings as a process of experiencing diverse forms of archives. Moi Tran’s new experiment ‘The Lost Buffalo and Sister Imposter’ that ‘exercises a process of analogue encoding / decoding to conjure up drawings, text, microfilm documents and visual scores for sonic improvisation in a constellation of speculative communication. The experiment is situated at the interface of communication and ‘information repository systems’ that is found in all sites of information storage and transmission, whether that be an archive, an image, a song, a text, a conversation, a code.

These new works are part of a larger year-long project to develop new tools for accessing, activating and sharing the collection and shared heritage. A parallel exhibition will be presented in Vietnam at The Outpost, Hanoi, 24 November – 17 December 2023.

Well Settled opening 4th November 2023
‘Night of the 30th’ (2023) by Nhà Sàn Collective, Well Settled, LUX
‘The Lost Buffalo and Sister Imposter II’ (2023) by Moi Tran Encoded Text Paintings, Well Settled, LUX
‘Books from the South East Asian Research Centre, An Viet Library by George Clark, Well Settled, LUX
An Việt banner by Lưu Chữ at Well Settled opening 4th November 2023, LUX

Background to exhibition

In 2021, Hackney Archives and the Hackney Chinese Community Services received a grant from the National Archives, enabling them to rescue the An Việt Archives – the largest known British Vietnamese community archive in the UK which was almost lost when their former building in Hackney was squatted. The historical documents were created by the An Viet Foundation (AVF), which was set up in Hackney in 1981 to support Vietnamese settlement in London after the Second Indochina War. It was a central hub for Vietnamese families providing support with housing, health outreach, English language, and mother tongue classes.

On 18 November the broadcast commission ‘Amplifying Archives’ by Cường Minh Bá Phạm, Trà My Hickin, Koa Phạm, Stefan Nielsen, Nic Anette Miller and Thierry Phung will be launched at our listening party.

The projects have been commissioned by An Việt Archives, supported by the British Council as part of the UK/Vietnam Season 2023 and Hackney Archives, LUX, Nhà Sàn Collective, The Outpost, Á Space and the University of Westminster.