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Cut up between two venues of the Nguyen Artwork Basis, Nguyễn Thị Thanh Mai’s newest exhibition, “No Extra, Not But,” brokers a gathering between the artist’s private and collective practices. The works on show within the Nam Lengthy campus hint Tonlé Sap lake’s inhabitants of stateless paracitizens, who’ve been accepted by neither Vietnam nor Cambodia. Within the ongoing collection “Disappearing Landscapes,” 2017–, images of makeshift homes are UV-printed onto driftwood, scraps of previous buildings, or kindling collected from their inhabitants’ final level of origin. Nguyễn dyes the cracked, peeling surfaces of the wooden in varied shades of blue, from aquamarine to periwinkle, rendering the photographs much more doleful. In Black Landscapes, 2018–20, a single-channel video guides us by way of a collection of dusky, neon-lit websites the place floating residences was anchored alongside the Mekong. These haunting landscapes are accompanied by the soundtrack of an previous shaman’s scratchy prayer for fish to return to the lake, rendering all of the extra acute the absence of the homes’ inhabitants—now persistent apparitions who invite us to ponder the porous validity of nationwide borders.
On the Van Phuc campus, the narrative stream shifts tempo as Nguyễn and virtually twenty of her artist mates have interaction with the working-class communities that when lived on the fringes of Hue’s Imperial Citadel however had been dislocated as a part of town’s “clean-up” after the Citadel obtained UNESCO World Heritage standing. The continued collaborative venture Fringe of the Citadel, initiated in 2021, extends the artists’ site-specific observe by way of a set of discovered objects left behind by uprooted households. Works like Hoàng Ngọc Tú’s Seen, unseen, 2022, an association of overlapping home quantity plates; Nguyễn Văn Hè’s Rebirth, 2022, a sculptural set up of 5 brick pillars; and Xuân Hạ’s Concentrated, 2022, an overturned desk lined with soil and roots, all serve to immerse viewers in a peripheral realm the place mementos of the displaced are reborn as questions across the precariousness of belonging.
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