Exhibition “iii.x_Unrealized Utopia”
10 am – 06 pm, Wed – Sun, 20 Sep – 31 Oct 2024
Gallery Medium
240A/B Pasteur, District 3, HCMC
From the organizer:
Gallery Medium proudly presents “iii.x_Unrealized Utopia”, the first solo exhibition by Saigon-based artist Arlette Quỳnh-Anh Trần.
Arlette Quỳnh-Anh Trần is an art laborer based in Saigon. She makes art collectively and individually and curates and writes. Her artworks blend politics and sci-fi aesthetics through assemblages of animation, 3D design, historical archives, and architecture.
The exhibition’s title, “iii. x_Unrealized Utopia,” takes the form of a data file and brings together artworks that can be interpreted as transmissions from unrealized futures. Trần’s artworks are based on research in international archives of the Bauhaus and the nation-building project in Vietnam since the 1960s. The exhibition includes artworks with diverse materials, such as paintings, sculptures, videos, and digital collages experimented on various printing materials.
In The Unrealized Utopia (2023) painting series, Trần collaborates with the machine using AI-generated technological and architectural structures. The artworks digest imaginations of Third World architecture generated by textual prompts directed at the internet’s global history that large language models embody and project the computed responses onto a future that has glanced back to the present.
Another highlighted work in the exhibition is the video Elysium without Shores (2024), collaboratively produced by blankNegatives studio, a kaleidoscope of digital divination and time travel. Like other works in the exhibition, the video is based on collaborations with AI programs. Elysium without Shores imagines a futurist ”múa bóng rỗi” ritual on an island in Cổ Chiên River of the Mekong Delta, the crossroads of Greco-Roman and the Funan Óc Eo civilization. Their ritual culminates in destroying a hydroelectric dam system at the source of the Mekong River that has adversely affected the delicate ecologies that the river runs through. This climatic and cosmic destruction is a complex critique of contemporary industrialization and a symbolic reclaiming of modernization trajectories that have gone awry.
“iii.x_Unrealised Utopia” is a collection of artworks that elides the linear march of history and modernist conceits. They lean into a technological acceleration wherein artificial intelligence is a collaborative medium of transmission from the past to the future and the future to the past so as to geopolitically recover the lost political histories and possibilities of our present.
About Arlette Quỳnh-Anh Trần
Arlette Quỳnh-Anh Trần is an art laborer based in Saigon. She makes art collectively and individually and curates and writes. Her artworks blend politics and sci-fi aesthetics through assemblages of animation, 3D design, historical archives, and architecture. Arlette is obsessed with the fantasy of a futuristic Third World utopia in which political ideals are remixed and human and non-human beings coexist and amalgamate. She creates a non-linear and absurd reading of modern histories that questions the dominant post-Cold War narratives about the Third World.
She studied art and theories at Freie Universität Berlin, Univerzita Karlova in Prague, and California Institute of the Arts with a Fulbright scholarship. She was a fellow of Art in Networks: GDR and its Global Relations Fellowship, Institut für Kunst—und Musikwissenschaft, TU Dresden, Germany, and the 2022 Margaret F. Williams Memorial Fellow at the Asian Art Museum San Francisco. In the fall of 2025, she will be part of the Asian Cultural Council’s New York Fellowship Program.
In 2012, she co-founded the Art Labor collective, working between the visual arts, social, and life sciences in various public contexts and locales on long-term, multiple-output projects.
Her individual practice and collective works with Art Labor have been shown at Leeum Museum of Art, Seoul; Lagos Biennial 2024; Albertinum Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Dresden; Asia Culture Center, Gwangju; Para Site, Hong Kong; 57th Carnegie International; Cosmopolis #1 at the Centre Pompidou, Paris.
About Gallery Medium
Gallery Medium is a multifaceted contemporary art gallery that blurs the lines between art, design and interiors. Alongside being an online platform, Gallery Medium hosts exhibitions, private views and events, selling art in a curated setting. Villa Medium, is a part of Gallery Medium, an art and design focused venue created specifically for exhibition and events such as “3 Weeks of Design” or “Hoa Mắt” Exhibition by photographer Thiên Minh.
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