Urgent Elements: Eco-Video from Southeast Asia 2019.04.10

Screenings & Conversations

UuDam Tran Nguyen
Khvay Samnang
Tuan Mami
Tuan Andrew Nguyen

This series of video screenings and artist conversation addresses environmental devastation in Cambodia and Vietnam. The artworks creatively document how this ecological destruction – from toxic mining and deforestation to sand extraction and animal poaching – coincides with social violence against some of the most vulnerable groups in the area, including the indigenous and poor. The series aims to bring together researchers, art practitioners, and students committed to investigating intersectional questions of climate justice.

Brianne Cohen, Curator
Assistant Professor, Contemporary Art History
University of Colorado Boulder

Khvay Samnang & UuDam Tran Nguyen
3/5 (Tue.) from 6:30-7:45PM
Location: Visual Arts Complex, Auditorium 1B20

Khvay Samnang is a founding member of Stiev Selapak, an art collective dedicated to experimental arts practice in Cambodia and an engagement with historical transformations and political violence wrought by regimes such as the Khmer Rouge. Through the expressive medium of dance, Khvay’s moving image work depicts the illegal extraction of sand from the country’s beaches and rivers for commercial land development in Singapore (Where is My Land? 2014, 14 min), as well as the threat of a hydro-electric project in southwestern Cambodia that could destroy the livelihood of the indigenous Chong people in that region (Preah Kunlong, 2016-17, 19 min).

UuDam Tran Nguyen’s video work, Serpents’ Tails (2015, 15 min) charts air pollution in Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon) caused by motorbikes. As in Khvay’s work, Nguyen also employs dancers to interact with and enliven the landscape. In this case, however, it is the rapidly transforming urban environment of Vietnam. Building on mythologies such as the Greek Laocoön, the Vietnamese Thanh Giong, and the Hindu Churning of the Ocean of Milk, the video portrays a dramatic conflict between human motorcyclists and “serpents’ tails,” or the exhaust of motorbikes trapped within elongated, stitched-together plastic bags.

Images: Khvay Samnang, Untitled (2011, 5-channel HD video installation with sound) and UuDam Tran Nguyen, Serpents’ Tails (2015, 15 min)

Tuan Mami
3/21 (Th.) from 6:30-7:45PM
Location: Visual Arts Complex, Auditorium 1B20

Tuan Mami has spent the last five years visiting and documenting his parents’ hometown in northeastern Vietnam, a mountain village that has become almost unlivable due to extractive limestone mining. In One’s Breath – Nothing Stands Still(2018, 30 min) is a poetic portrayal, one drawing from indigenous spiritual and Buddhist beliefs, of a landscape choked by toxic dust from the mining. It offers a fictional account of a spirit’s three-day journey to the “other side,” as a ghost story that suggests a place caught between life and death.

Images: Tuan Mami, In One’s Breath – Nothing Stands Still (2018, 30 min)

Tuan Andrew Nguyen
4/10 (Wed.) from 5:30-6:45PM
Location: Atlas, RM 102

Tuan Andrew Nguyen highlights human violence against animals in My Ailing Beliefs Can Cure Your Wretched Desires (2017, 19 min). In this riveting video work, two animal spirits of species that have recently gone extinct in Vietnam – the Javan rhino and a type of giant turtle – debate the possibility of animal liberation from humankind. Vietnam is a country with one of the most complex natural ecosystems on the planet, but a substantial number of its species are at risk of extinction. This moving image work imagines an animal revolution against human trophy kills, poaching for “medicinal” purposes, and neocolonial violence in the landscape.

Image: Tuan Andrew Nguyen, My Ailing Beliefs Can Cure Your Wretched Desires(2017, 19 min)