Tuấn Andrew Nguyễn – It Was What Is Will Be

Nguyễn’s films explore the human memory and its potential as political resistance. Through thorough research Nguyễn weaves together people’s stories, documentary material, mythology and fantastical visions of the future into narratives that are as visually as emotionally appealing. The themes that Nguyễn often return to in his works are refugees, displacement and the experience of returning home to an unfamiliar place. Sound and music play an important role in his films.

In the exhibition three films are shown: The Unburied Sounds of a Troubled Horizon (2022) with sculptures produced for this exhibition, The Boat People (2020) and The Island (2017). Together the three films create a temporal continuity that is referred to in the exhibition title: that which was, that which is and what will be. All three films take place in places with strong connections to the Vietnam War.

In Nguyễn’s latest work The Unburied Sounds of a Troubled Horizon the artist explores the physical remnants of the Vietnam War. The landscape in the province of Quảng Trị where the film is set is filled with bombshells, ammunition and untriggered explosives. The narrative follows a young woman named Nguyêt who alone takes care of her traumatized mother and their family run scrap yard. As an escape from reality Nguyêt creates sculptures of old bomb shells, sculptures that also take place in the gallery room. These, once death bringing objects are in the film transformed into objects whose resonating sounds have a healing power.

The Boat People show us a future where it is uncertain whether humanity has survived. A group of children travels the seas and collect histories from objects they find. The group lands in a place formerly known as Bataan. A Philippine province, west of the country’s capitol Manila, where a large refugee camp was built to take care of Vietnamese boat refugees. The term “boat people” was used for the approximately 800,000 humans who fled Vietnam by boat after the war.

In The Island events on the small island Pulau Bidong on the coast of Malaysia – once the world’s largest refugee camp – is weaved together with a dystopian vision of the future. Many of Nguyễn’s films take place in his home country of Vietnam and neighboring areas in southeast Asia. Even though they often are grounded in the Vietnam War and its aftermath the discussed themes are frightfully contemporary. The exodus from Vietnam and its neighboring countries during and after the Vietnam War was one of the first events referred to in mass media as a refugee crisis. A word that has become commonplace for us today when millions of humans are on the run from totalitarian terror, war and climate change.