MAP 2022 – Lecture 01: The Purpose of Parahistory in Late Socialist...

MAP 2022 – Lecture 01: The Purpose of Parahistory in Late Socialist Vietnam

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Wed 12 Oct 2022, 02:30 pm – 04:30 pm
ZOOM (100 people)
Á Space (20 people)
59 Ngô Gia Tự, Long Biên, Hà Nội
Registration

From the organizer:

Subsistence crises have recurred throughout Vietnamese modern history, notably in the contexts of French colonialism, Japanese occupation, and postcolonial and postwar communist economic centralization and agricultural collectivization. The Great Famine of 1944-1945 – whose causes have been attributed to the convergence of natural disaster, French and Japanese mismanagement, and American interference – has been significantly commemorated within Vietnamese revolutionary history. Other, more recent, episodes of hunger have been creatively remembered through a range of official and unofficial forms, such as film, literature, and museum exhibitions, even if such episodes occupy a more uneasy place within the sphere of state culpability and thus national historiography. Nonetheless, there is clearly a rich body of artistic expression and remembrance of the crisis of hunger in Vietnamese history.

Contemporary artists have continued to explore the topic of hunger and the memory of subsistence crisis in Vietnam, with two works standing out for their depiction of such events as transtemporal, transnational crystallizations of history. Tiffany Chung’s chronicles of a soundless dream (2011) blurs the 1918 kome sodo (rice riots) in Japan with the queuing for food rations during the Subsidy Period (1975-1986) in Vietnam through a visceral, and lyrical, theatrical dance performance. Phan Thao Nguyen’s Mute Grain (2019) serves as a poetic, dreamlike meandering of fragments of images, materials, and oral narratives across moving image, silk painting, and installation. Quotations from Bengali and Japanese literature dislocate the specificity of the work’s historical reference to the 1944-1945 Great Famine in Vietnam through narration set in other conditions of starvation and geopolitical crisis.

This talk considers what may be perceived as the desire to locate the personal and the universal through the merging of such contexts. Why the need for such expanded means of representation when historical erasure or historiographical gap are not at issue? Is it an attempt to unsettle the national narrative and its teleological rehabilitations? I intend to develop these questions through the concept of parahistory, which I argue should not be primarily understood as a means of bypassing cultural censorship. I plan to explore and define how parahistory functions here through Benjamin’s philosophy of history (as well as the elements of parallelism, participation, and play) and as a means through which the artists may be subtly critiquing – rather than pursuing – the project of historical rehabilitation.

– Prof. Dr. Pamela Nguyen Corey

About Prof. Dr. Pamela Nguyen Corey

Pamela Nguyen Corey researches and teaches modern and contemporary art history, focusing on Southeast Asia within broader transnational Asian and global contexts. She received her Ph.D. (History of Art and Visual Studies) from Cornell University. Prior to joining Fulbright University Vietnam in January 2021, she was an assistant professor in the History of Art & Archaeology department at SOAS University of London. Pamela has published in numerous academic journals, exhibition catalogs, and platforms for artistic and cultural commentary. Her first book, The City in Time: Contemporary Art and Urban Form in Vietnam and Cambodia (University of Washington Press, 2021), was the recipient of a Millard Meiss Publication Fund from the College Art Association.

The Lecture forms part of Month of Arts Practice, abbreviated as MAP, is an annual art project of Heritage Space.
MAP 2022 has the theme “WAR” – a response to the wars from the past to present time by different perspectives and minor histories. There are 10 artists from Germany, Japan, Korea and Vietnam participating in this project. MAP 2022 includes 2-month residency and exchange (October – November 2022), followed by an exhibition at the end of November 2022.

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