HCMC – Exhibition “how i miss the taste of tangerine”

Opening: Sat 09 Mar 2019, 6.30 pm
Exhibition: 09 Mar – 06 Apr 2019
Sàn Art Gallery
Millennium Masteri, B6.17 & B6.16
132 Bến Vân Đồn, Dist 4, HCMC

From the organizer:

“how i miss the taste of tangerine,” Xuân Hạ’s site-specific and video installation at Sàn Art, animates a nested situation emblematic of modern urbanscapes: a fictionalized city is screened within a white cube gallery inside a labyrinthine high-rise condominium surrounded by soaring financial towers. The breathless recursion of boxed spaces that motivates the installation carries the delirious rhythm of urban milieus. Viewers are primed to be alert to the no-frill design of the common containers that house human beings as well as artworks. By extension, the white cube, a now-global standard regime of art displays, is exposed and metamorphoses into a medium itself.

Besieged by the unbearable compartmentalization of being, Xuân Hạ’s moving-image work zooms in on the diseased, if not deceased, space of a claustrophobic apartment while simultaneously imagining the deserted landmarks of an imagined city. Set in the fictional year 2080 when most of the human race have relocated to Mars, the film forecasts an exhausted and evacuated land where the city apparatus withers among defunct monuments and desolate gravestones. In spite, or perhaps because, of the menace of potential decay, the title of the installation tenderly summons a scent of landscapes lost.

– Text by Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng (excerpts)