Traveling Exhibition “Behind the Terrain”

Opening: Sat 18 Mar 2017, 6 pm
Talk with curators and artist: Sun 19 Mar 2017, 4 pm
Exhibition: 18 – 31 Mar 2017
Nha San Collective

From Nha San Collective:

The traveling exhibition “Behind the Terrain” – sketches on imaginative landscapes – examines questions that emerge from the interrelation of the politics of remembrance, memory, as well as individual historicities within critical research and art practices. The focus on ‘landscape’, in terms of imaginary narrative as well as politics behind actual terrain, is brought into perspective by artists with different cultural and immigrant backgrounds and their relationship to defining terms like: “migration”, “border” or “identity”, and the landscapes of their practice. The exhibition will travel through Southeast and East Asia (Yogyakarta, Hanoi, and Tokyo).

Our encounter with terrain emerges from the hectic pitch of our daily lives, within spaces where information from outside assault us constantly. Sometimes, there is probably a strange sense of intuition towards what is “seen”: does an image when continually repeated, gradually acquire “truth” due to consistency, or does it remain imaginary;? We stray into cracks and grapple with the in/between, as we try to distinguish imaginary landscape from physical terrain, but should we?

“Behind the Terrain” – sketches on imaginative landscapes initiates the recovery of invisible and missing landscape which lay behind terrains of historical controversy. The word “landscape” within modernity, specially in Western history, connotes vistas and gardening, tourism, exotic destinations — an aesthetic middle class value, or for the empire: territorial expansion and nationalism: Landscape was never a neutral untouched entity, but rather an empty field unto which to project desires. Tasked with depicting the inhabitants of the newly conquered lands, images and descriptions from discovery voyages became “history”, and it stirred up the imagination, tailoring landscape to the demands of fantasy. This physical intrusion, though thoroughly disregarding knowledge embodied onto the terrain, allowed for a somewhat transnational re-imagining.

In the context of the Asia, whose cultural heritage cuts across national borderlines, but is at the same time clearly delineated with distinct imperial inheritances from past political ambitions, the South/East Asian geographical and cultural multiplicity intersect not only geographically but also as interconnected historicities. Furthermore, the landscape still bares the marks of violence: ravaged for economic gain, harnessed for unseen natural resources, systems of agriculture overhauled to produce that one “export” product — in the end this mined landscape is an extremely artificial one.

With this traveling exhibition, the project aims to ask following questions: how is the history and memory of conflict and repression unearthed, and how has it been forgotten? Is this amnesia encouraged by a modern state of materialism? How does landscape ground us, at the same time, support a re-imagination of the invisible? And, lastly, how does the navigation of this in/visible terrain produce a mapping of our daily lives?

Artists:

Martha Atienza
Nguyễn Thùy Anh
Veronika Burger
Ishu Han
Ran Kokubun
mamoru
Stephanie Misa
Elia Nurvista
Nguyễn Thanh Thúy
Phạm Ngọc Hà Ninh
Nguyễn Minh Phước
Veronika Radulovic
Trương Thiện

Curators:
Mika Maruyama
Đỗ Tường Linh

Banner photo:
Nguyễn Thanh Thúy

The talk with curators and artist from the exhibition Do Tuong Linh from Vietnam, Mika Maruyama from Japan and Stephanie Misa from the Phillippines will share their art encounter and the artworks from the show.

The talk will be in Vietnamese and English

Mika Maruyama

Born in Japan, and based in Vienna and Tokyo, Mika Maruyama has been actively working in contemporary art field with galleries, exhibitions, and various art projects internationally. While producing critical texts and reviews on art and performances, her interests lie in a complex intersection of body and environment with an interdisciplinary approach to theory and practice of art. Graduated with a master’s degree from Yokohama Graduate School of Culture at Yokohama National University (2015), she is currently a doctoral student at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna.

Đỗ Tường Linh

Born and grew up in Hà Nội, Linh has been actively engaged in the local and regional art scenes since 2006. She has worked with various galleries, art institutions, foundations and contributed to many art projects. In 2015, Linh received the prestigious Alphawood Scholarship to pursue her M.A in Contemporary Art and Art Theory of Asia and Africa at SOAS, University of London. Her research interest focuses on the avant-garde art movement of Vietnam in 1990s, conceptualism, post colonialism theory, art and politics. She is aspired to work with young artists and interested in connecting and creating inter-disciplinary dialogs and collaborations across generations and cultures.

Stephanie Misa

Born in Cebu City, Philippines in 1979, Stephanie Misa currently lives and works in Vienna, Austria. She graduated with a Masters from Academy of Fine Arts Vienna in 2012. Stephanie consistently displays an interest in complex and diverse histories and how this is represented and expressed within culture, relating to these topics through her video work, installations, prints, and collages. Her artistic production have enabled her work to examine and question identity, historical authenticity, embodiment, and expound on the immigrant experience. She was a recipient of the Kültür Gemma Work Stipend for Immigrant Artists and Culture Works in 2014/15, and recently co-curated the show Didto sa Amoa (Where we’re from) in 2016 at the VBKÖ Vienna. She is currently in an Artist-in-Residency with BKA in Yogyakarta, Indonesia and is exhibiting in the duo show All continues nothing collapses with Veronika Burger at the Sewon Art Space.

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Communication partner: Hanoi Grapevine

Nhà Sàn COLLECTIVE is not a museum, a gallery or an international culture institute where completed work are presented by established artists. Just like Nhà Sàn Studio before, it is a working studio to nurture where artists can create, collaborate, be given advice, critiques, and have chances to meet with international artists, curators. Works that are presented at open studio every month could be finished or not, but the process of developing idea and working to improve the quality of the art work for local artists is what Nhà Sàn COLLECTIVE focuses on.

If you are interested and curious about experimental art, and want to have conversation with the working artists, please visit

Nha San COLLECTIVE 15th floor, Hanoi Creative City Building, 01 Luong Yen, Hanoi Website: http://nhasan.org/ Email: [email protected]