Art Talk “The Artist as Activist Archivist” by Jacqueline Hoàng Nguyễn

Fri 04 May 2018, 7.30 – 10.30 pm
Six Space

From the organizer:

Six Space cordially invite you to an art talk and discussion with artist Jacqueline Hoàng Nguyễn: “The Artist as Activist Archivist”.

Over the last decades, archive has become an important theme for the practice of contemporary artists. In his 2004 essay “The Archival Impulse”, art historian Hal Foster has defined archival art as a genre that “make[s] historical information, often lost or displaced, physically present. To this end [archival artists] elaborate on the found image, object, and favor the installation format.” While the archival art could be in forms of projects with real archival materials or artworks using by artists or curators in constructing a narrative or making of an exhibition, Nguyễn proposed a form of counter-archives where she embraced alternative structures for vernacular images and micro-histories. Nguyễn’s practice questions classification, contested notions and form of representation in different cultural contexts and the knowledge production process. During the talk, Nguyễn will talk about her works and hopes to tease out the role of the artist as of an activist archivist, which theorist Mark Wigley describes as “one who designs an archive whose purpose is to polemically rearrange the standard perception of the worlds outside […] is to change the direction of thinking.”

About Jacqueline Hoàng Nguyễn:

Jacqueline Hoàng Nguyễn is a research-based artist currently living and working in Stockholm (Sweden). She uses a broad range of medium while mostly relying on archival material to investigate issues of historicity, collectivity, Utopian politics, and multiculturalism within the framework of feminist theories.

Jacqueline Hoàng Nguyễn completed the Whitney’s Independent Study Program, New York, in 2011, having obtained her MFA and a post-graduate diploma in Critical Studies from the Malmö Art Academy, Sweden, in 2005, and a BFA from Concordia University, Montreal, in 2003. She has been awarded many grants and fellowships, and her work has been exhibited internationally. In 2015, she was the first artist-in-residence at the Museum of Ethnography in Stockholm. The residency was part of SWICH – Sharing a World of Inclusion, Creativity and Heritage – a collaborative project involving ten European museums of Ethnography and World Cultures. Together with curator Rado Ištok, they are currently editing Crating the World: Displaced Myths, Desires and Meanings, a parallel compendium to Nguyễn’s exhibition Black Atlas presented at the Museum of Ethnography. Both the exhibition and publication are made possible with the generous support of Sharjah Art Foundation.

For more information, please visit the artist’s website

The discussion is in English and Vietnamese

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