KVT – Revved up about Rivers

I guess the important question hanging in the air could be…is any of the stuff on show in Riverscapes good art? My answer is yes! Probably some of the most excellent art you’ll manage to see in Hanoi this year. A lot is instantly engaging…take Nguyen Thi Thanh Mai’s installation of old boxes of washed-up footwear, or take the underwater scarecrows in Middle Ground.

Some like the soundscapes of Rise and Fall and Luong Hue Trinh’s Black Circle and Sound Bridge can be wonderfully perplexing and are worth taking time to be fully involved with (and in).

Phan Thao Nguyen states in reference to her nice video Mekong Mechanical that the real experience of visiting the Mekong was so different from the version of the Mekong delta popularized in guidebooks and documentaries which always promote the river as beautiful and welcoming in nature. And perhaps its this romantisized bullsh*t spin that is one of the essentials to be forcibly addressed before we can expect people to take on board riverscape realities and responsibilities.

To conclude….a little riverscape horror story. A young friend, now 26, grew up in a village on a river, about 40km from Hanoi. They swam in, fished from and irrigated with its green waters. Industrial Parks sprang up with no environmental planning provisions to stop them polluting the surrounding rivers and groundwaters. 10 years on the river is almost dead. Runs foul smelling and black and causes skin irritations……. we too often label it progress and call it good! Provides jobs though!

See Ilza Burchett’s crit on this show, earlier in the Grapevine, for a series of excellent images and a very nice overview and DO GO AND SEE IT. Kids certainly need to be exposed.

Thanks again Goethe for giving artists a grand platform to experiment on…and for giving me several hours of intense pleasure.