Perforation, Ellipse

Perforation, Ellipse is a spatial exploration of rupture, circulation, and mediated cultural memory. The work unfolds across a projected 16mm performance of the artist shooting an arrow on downtown New York City rooftop. The sound of an arrow hitting its off-screen target punctuates the cuts on a series of synchronous videos. Nguyen orchestrates a dynamic architecture of screens, drifting between sensorial abstractions, narrative passages in her film Aisle 9, and archival online footage of Vietnamese bolero music.The exhibition explores the tensions within movement, temporality, and holes in the archive.

"...Across the installation, melodies of once forbidden bolero music, also known as nhạc vàng (“yellow music”), periodically surge across the multiple channels of video, aligning disparate images on the sculpture’s monitors, into a shared emotional frequency. Following the American War in Vietnam, the Vietnamese government banned bolero music for its sentimentality and romantic lyricism, however, the genre has recently reentered mainstream circulation. It endured underground in Vietnam because it was condemned, forced to exist quietly in households; and in the United States and abroad, disseminated through diasporic tapes, and transnational cabarets such as the television show Paris by Night.

Wall works made with gold leaf and metal evoke a linguistic slippage: vàng means gold as well as “yellow,” which was the color used to disparage bolero as decadent or counterrevolutionary. Nguyen uses gold as a conceptual hinge to mark the transmutation of cultural forms under pressure, and an index of political contradiction. When bolero swells in unison across the installation with a momentary sense of continuity, a fleeting homeland is built through affect, time, and space, rather than territory. By staging cultural memory as an unstable montage, the exhibition questions how narratives of belonging are constructed, mythologized, and controlled. Instead of offering a single story, Nguyen proposes a constellation of moving images whose connections remain open-ended, and move according to the pulse of time drifting, interrupted, and traversing future, past, and present...."

-Jessica Kwok, Curator

Translations of Ellipse Series