Media release
The Other Side of Now is a solo exhibition of film and sculpture by Vietnamese American artist Tuan Andrew Nguyen
The exhibition explores the transnational entanglements created by colonisation and war
The exhibition opens 22 August 2024 and runs until 20 July 2025
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(Cape Town, 13 August 2024): Zeitz MOCAA presents The Other Side of Now, a solo exhibition of film and sculpture by Vietnamese American artist Tuan Andrew Nguyen. The Other Side of Now explores the transnational entanglements created by colonisation and war. Attending to the erased voices of Vietnamese, Senegalese, and Moroccan history, it proposes a space for communal healing and remembrance. The exhibition opens 22 August 2024 and runs until 20 July 2025.
Tuan Andrew Nguyen was born in 1976 in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. Shortly after, he and his family migrated to the United States where he lived and eventually graduated from the Fine Arts programme at the University of California, Irvine, in 1999 and received his Master of Fine Arts from The California Institute of the Arts in 2004. Nguyen currently lives and works in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.
Nguyen’s films move along spectrums of fact and fiction, past and present, memory and forgetting. He uses the power of storytelling to create speculative visions of painful histories. He opens a doorway for empathy and healing for both the subject and viewer. In letters to a lost family member, imagined conversations between generations, or reincarnation as a means of healing from physical trauma, his work looks at hard pasts to realise healed futures.
The exhibition presents three film works: Because No One Living Will Listen / Nguoi Song Chang Ai Nghe (2023), The Specter of Ancestors Becoming (2019), and The Unburied Sounds of a Troubled Horizon (2022). All three films are connected by the period 1954 to 1972; between the end of the First Indochina War and the conclusion of the American War in Vietnam. One chapter considers Moroccan soldiers who defected from the colonial army only for their return home to be hindered by the outbreak of the American War. Another tells the story of Senegalese-Vietnamese children and their disrupted connections to family and origin. This affirms a deep engagement with migration narratives stories and charting diasporic experiences in Asia, Africa and beyond.
Nguyen creates sculptural objects that materialise his cinematic worlds, placing viewers face to face with relics that carry the weight of generations. These include tangible remnants of war in the five Singing Bowls (2022), constructed from leftover brass artillery shells; delicate embroidered tapestries of Viet Minh propaganda leaflets in A Breach (2024); and intimate family photographs in Solidarities Between the Reincarnated (2019).
The exhibition title highlights the shifts in and between time that are ever present within the artist’s work. What is the other side of ‘now’? Is it ‘then’? And when was ‘then’? And what waits to be revealed when we arrive on the other side? Through narration, Nguyen’s work probes history to bring to light lost stories that are intertwined with an unclear reality. These might be the same inherited stories that have been told over and over, but in time, there comes a longing to know more, a need to address the questions that were never asked and in turn, never answered. Is it possible to get to the other side and find a different ending? Can we reroute and rewrite histories that are personal and shared with the hope of one day arriving at a place of solace and closure?
“The Other Side of Now forms part of an ongoing series of in-depth, research-based solo exhibitions by Zeitz MOCAA that bring into focus and contextualises the practices of important artists from Africa and the Diaspora, and those whose work focuses on seminal topics in African history,” says Beata America, curator of the exhibition and Zeitz MOCAA Assistant Curator. America adds that, “In the spirit of radical solidarity, our programme looks beyond the continent’s borders, attending to new and old entanglements that implicate the world in Africa and Africa in the world.”
Zeitz MOCAA’s exhibition and curatorial programming is generously supported by Gucci, Mellon Foundation, and BMW South Africa. This exhibition is made possible through support from the Terra Foundation for American Art.
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Please find the media toolkit with full biographies, imagery and image credits, here. For media enquiries, contact Evaan Jason Ferreira at evaanjason.ferreira@zeitzmocaa.museum.
Issued by Zeitz MOCAA Communications.
MEDIA TOOLKIT
About Zeitz MOCAA
Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa (Zeitz MOCAA) is a public not-for-profit institution that collects, preserves, researches and exhibits contemporary art from Africa and its diaspora; conceives and hosts international exhibitions; develops supporting educational, discursive and enrichment programmes; encourages intercultural understanding; and strives towards access for all. The museum’s galleries feature rotating temporary exhibitions with dedicated space for the permanent collection. The institution also includes the Centre for Art Education (CFAE), and The Atelier, a museum residency programme for artists living and working in Cape Town.
Zeitz MOCAA, situated at the Silo District, South Arm Road, V&A Waterfront in Cape Town, South Africa, is open Monday through Sunday, 10 am to 6 pm (last entry at 5.30 pm).
zeitzmocaa.museum
About the Terra Foundation
The Terra Foundation for American Art, established in 1978 and having offices in Chicago and Paris, supports organizations and individuals locally and globally with the aim of fostering intercultural dialogues and encouraging transformative practices that expand narratives of American art, through the foundation’s grant program, collection, and initiatives.
terraamericanart.org
About Gucci
Founded in Florence, Italy, in 1921, Gucci is one of the world’s leading luxury brands, led by President and CEO Marco Bizzarri and Creative Director Alessandro Michele. Following the House’s centenary, Gucci forges ahead into the next hundred years, continuing to redefine luxury while celebrating the creativity, craftsmanship and innovation at the core of its values.
Gucci is part of the global luxury group, Kering, which manages the development of a series of renowned Houses in fashion, leather goods, jewellery and watches.
gucci.com.
About the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation
The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation is the United States’ largest supporter of the arts and humanities. Since 1969, the Foundation has been guided by its core belief that the humanities and arts are essential to human understanding. The Foundation believes that the arts and humanities are where we express our complex humanity and that everyone deserves the beauty, transcendence and freedom that can be found there. Through our grants, we seek to build just communities enriched by meaning and empowered by critical thinking, where ideas and imagination can thrive.
mellon.org.
About BMW
The fascination of the BMW Group lies not just in our products and technologies but in our history too, which has been written by inventors, pioneers and engineers. Today, the BMW Group is the world’s leading manufacturer of premium cars and motorcycles and a provider of premium financial and mobility services. We operate over 30 production sites around the world and a global sales network.
At the BMW Group, we know we have a responsibility to society and the world. That’s why we have fixed targets and values that govern the way we do business. With the help of our strategic focus, we want to make a meaningful contribution to a more sustainable world and combine top-flight mobility with innovative technologies.
www.bmwgroup.com