Art talk & Screening “Don’t Call It Art!”
Thurs 29 Dec 2022, 06 pm
Mơ Art Space
136 Hàng Trống, Hoàn Kiếm, Hà Nội
Registration link
From the organizer:
* Public program, a part of “Don’t Call It Art!”
Moderator: Quỳnh Trần – Author/Journalist
Participants:
– Veronika Radulovic
– Nguyễn Anh Tuấn – Artistic Director of Heritage Space & Vietnam Contemporary Art Database
– Flinh – Visual Artist, Co-founder of Hay là
Truong Tan, Nguyen Minh Thanh and Nguyen Quang Huy were among the first artists in the 1990s Doi Moi climate who wanted to explore new freedoms and pursue their own artistic path. They sought aesthetic expressions that would go far beyond those promoted and permitted at the state’s art academies. Yet despite their resounding reputation, most of their actual work largely remains unknown, except for a few iconic pieces and later works. The systematic documentation and conservation of these artefacts of Vietnamese art history – including photographs, advertisements, newspaper cut-outs, performance videos of various lengths, drawings and paintings of every kind, snapshots encapsulating the zeitgeist of this era – owes its enduring preservation to Veronika Radulovic – a German artist and who lived in Hanoi from 1993 to 2005 and was at the time, an integral part of this young art scene.[1]
The screening features Veronika’s recordings of performances by artists at that time. At first, our moderator and guest speakers will guide people back to the Hanoi art scene in the 1990s to take a glance at past happenings and recontextualize the context of the whole project.
The videos are set up like an installation Veronika did before at Goethe Institute Hanoi in 1998. These are recordings of great value, considering that performances are often spontaneous, and thus might be hard to plan ahead for documentation. This event will be a rare opportunity for the audience to access such videos in Veronika’s archive and learn more about the early artistic experiments of contemporary art in Vietnam.
[1] This introduction is primarily composed of excerpts from Annette Bhagwati’s essay ‘Don’t Call It Art! Contemporary Art in Vietnam 1993-1999′, pp. 15-21, all revisited and rearranged to suit the purpose of the showcase.
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