Artist Talk with filmmaker and sculptor Tuan Andrew Nguyễn.

Please join us for a talk and Q&A with filmmaker and sculptor Tuan Andrew Nguyễn.

Walker 202, 120 Boylston St. Boston, MA. Doors open at 4pm. Free, but Registration Required via EventBrite.

Nguyễn lives and works Hồ Chí Minh City, Việt Nam.

Tuấn Andrew Nguyễn’s practice explores the power of memory and its potential to act as a form of political resistance. His practice is fueled by research and a commitment to communities that have faced traumas caused by colonialism, war, and displacement. Through his continuous attempts to engage with vanishing or vanquished historical memory, Nguyễn investigates the erasures that the colonial project has brought to bear on certain parts of the world. Through collaborative endeavors with various communities throughout the world, Nguyen sets out to cultivate and empower these strategies enacted and embodied by his collaborators. Through this collaborative practice, he explores memory as a form of resistance and empowerment, emphasizing the power of storytelling as a means for healing, empathy and solidarity.

Nguyễn, based primarily in Saigon, works between various mediums but devotes much of his attention towards producing moving-image works and sculpture. Nguyễn’s intrigued with the relationship between narrative and objects leads him to make projects that combine moving image and sculpture – oftentimes many of his films begin with an object, such as destroyed memorials built by former refugees, or the skeletal remains of the last rhino in Vietnam for instance, and its story.  Approaching memory as a phenomenon that is intangible and abstract, Nguyễn often thinks beyond the restrictions of time (past, present, future) which also gives way to thinking about supernaturalisms (ghosts, specters, hauntings) as political tools.