Is it morning for you yet? 58th Carnegie International September 24, 2022–April 2, 2023

Is it morning for you yet?
58th Carnegie International
September 24, 2022–April 2, 2023

Professional preview: September 23, 10am–5pm

Public opening day: September 24, 10am–5pm

Carnegie Museum of Art
4400 Forbes Avenue
Pittsburgh, PA 15213
USA
Hours: Monday and Wednesday–Saturday 10am–5pm,
Thursday 10am–8pm

cmoa.org
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If you are an art or education professional who would like to attend the professional preview of Is it morning for you yet?, 58th Carnegie International on September 23, 2022, click here to register.

Is it morning for you yet?, the 58th Carnegie International, traces the geopolitical imprint of the United States since 1945 to situate the “international” within a local context. This framework prepares a historical ground for the movements of images, ideas, objects, and people that incite emancipatory expressions and artworks. The exhibition brings together an ensemble of erratic, cunning, unruly, disobedient, undisciplined, and intractable attitudes and gestures that overwhelm the ambition of any one organizational intent.

The 58th Carnegie International borrows its title from a Mayan Kaqchikel expression, when instead of saying “Good morning,” it is customary to ask, “Is it morning for you yet?” The question acknowledges that our internal clocks are different; our anxieties, troubles, and heartaches are not the same. When it is morning for some, it might still be night for others.

New works and commissions alongside historical works—from the collections of international institutions, estates, and artists—negotiate transnational networks of artistic solidarity and the multigenerational weight of our entangled inheritances. The artworks in the exhibition motivate ideas that hold in balance the aims of resistance and representation with the desire to reconfigure our ways of life and being together.

Is it morning for you yet? was developed in a global pandemic that upended our collective and individual lives. During this time, we experienced solitude and solidarity as one. It made us consider how we spend our time or how we share it with each other—how to be contemporary. Following the work of more than 100 artists, the exhibition traces a practice of reconstitution, reminding us that while our histories of pain and longing bind us, our narratives of defiance and survival help us reimagine the world.

Ash Trilogy (v.3), "Only the memory screams", Frac Pays de la Loire, 18 09

/ 30 12 22

Soufiane Ababri, Francis Alÿs, Leonor Antunes, Babi Badalov, Becky Beasley, Richard Billingham, Karla Black, Peter Briggs, Damien Cadio, Miriam Cahn, Marc Camille Chaimowicz, Béatrice Dacher, Richard Deacon, Jeremy Deller, Rineke Dijkstra, Thea Djordjadze, Jason Dodge, Hubert Duprat, Léuli Eshrāghi, Patrick Faigenbaum, Herlyng Ferla, Bernard Frize, Leah Gordon, Clarisse Hahn, Mona Hatoum, Noritochi Hirakawa, Edi Hila, Ann Veronica Janssens, Sarah Jones, Hiwa K, Johannes Kahrs, Melike Kara, Koo Jeong A, Jiri Kovanda, Maria Lassnig, Teresa Margolles, Carlos Martiel, Josephine Meckseper, Damir Očko, Gabriel Orozco, Bill Owens, Gina Pane, Eric Poitevin, Richard Prince, Vandy Rattana, Jimmy Robert, Khvay Samnang, Chris Shaw, Lucy Skaer, Michael E. Smith, Georges Tony Stoll, Stéphane Tidet, Thu-Van Tran, Truong Cong Tung, Luc Tuymans, Kara Walker,Andy Warhol, Boyd Webb

18 09 / 30 12 22

Frac Pays de la Loire
24 bis Boulevard Ampère
44470 Carquefou

02 28 01 50 00

Wednesdays, Thursdays, Fridays and Sundays from 2 p.m. to 6 p.m.

Subtitle taken from Karim Kattan, Preliminaries for a future orchard

Trilogy of Ashes is an exhibition conceived in three stages based on the collection of the Frac des Pays de la Loire.

The exhibition brings together 63 artists, 89 works including 74 from the Frac collection and 10 guest artists. It offers a multi-entry reflection on what makes home through the notions of identity, language and memory relating to individuals as well as to collective dynamics. Conceived by Marion Duquerroy and Thomas Fort, and accompanied by students from the History of Art degree at UCO d'Angers, it is supplemented by a program of encounters and performances.

This third and last part thinks about the form of the disintegration, the transformation or even the sublimation of identities (fluidity, creolization, otherness). Through a landscape of signs tending towards abstraction (Lucy Skaer, Thea Djordjadze or Melike Kara), the images are diluted and the bodies rest (Bernard Frize or Chris Shaw). If something elusive remains, hollow, languages and memories continue to crackle.

A Beast, a God and a Line, 30.11 - 16.2 2020, Kunsthall Trondheim, Norway

Nabil Ahmed, Anida Yoeu Ali, Malala Andrialavidrazana, Joël Andrianomearisoa, Daniel Boyd, Sarat Mala Chakma, Chandrakant Chitara, Rashid Choudhury, Christy Chow, Cian Dayrit, Ines Doujak, Gauri Gill, Simryn Gill, Sheela Gowda, Garima Gupta, Taloi Havini, Huang Rui, Dilara Begum Jolly, Jrai Dew Collective (curated by Art Labor), Jaffa Lam, Jiun-Yang Li, Charles Lim Yi Yong, Lavanya Mani, Moelyono, Manish Nai, Sarah Naqvi, Nguyen Trinh Thi, Jakrawal Nilthamrong, Nontawat Numbenchapol, Jimmy Ong, Anand Patwardhan, Etan Pavavalung, Paul Pfeiffer, Thao-Nguyen Phan, Sheelasha Rajbhandari, Joydeb Roaja, Norberto Roldan, Zamthingla Ruivah, Ampannee Satoh, Chai Siris, Simon Soon (with RJ Camacho and Celestine Fadul), Than Sok, Su Yu Hsien, Truong Công Tùng, Raja Umbu, Rajesh Vangad, Munem Wasif, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Ming Wong, Lantian Xie, Sawangwongse Yawnghwe, Trevor Yeung, Tuguldur Yondonjamts

Para Site and Kunsthall Trondheim are delighted to present A beast, a god, and a line in Trondheim, Norway. Curated by Cosmin Costinas, this expansive travelling exhibition is woven through the connections and circulations of ideas and forms across a geography commonly called Asia-Pacific. Arbitrary as any mapping, not least in contemporary art exhibitions, it could also be known by several other definitions, which the exhibition explores and untangles. The stories in A beast, a god, and a line journey on routes going back to several historical eras, starting from the early Austronesian world that has woven a maritime universe surpassed in scale only by European colonialism and is taken as the speculative and approximate geographical perimeter of this exhibition. Overlapping and sometimes conflicting or barely discernible beneath the strident layers of contemporaneity and the modern waves of destruction, these fluid worlds are still the pillars of a region that is going through a process of replacing its colonial cartographic coordinates, a process this exhibition proudly serves.

The exhibition is organised by Para Site, Dhaka Art Summit, and Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw. It was on view, throughout 2018, at all these institutions as well as at Pyinsa Rasa and TS1 at the Secretariat & Myanm/art Gallery in Yangon. The exhibition will be travelling to MAIIAM Contemporary Art Museum, Chiang Mai, in April 2020.

The iteration in Trondheim is organised by Kunsthall Trondheim and Para Site, Hong Kong.

Opaque Signs - A Fundraising Show by Sàn Art, 17 December 2019 — 22 January 2020, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

A Fundraising Show by Sàn Art

Location: Sàn ArtMillennium Masteri Unit B6.17 & B6.16

132 Bến Vân Đồn, Ward 6, District 4, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

“Opaque Signs” is a celebration of works graciously donated by Sàn Art’s artist-friends on the occasion of the organization’s twelfth year running. Though diverse in terms of forms, concepts and references, these gifts share a material element of luminosity. As store signs made of neon and LED lights proliferate across Vietnamese cities, light becomes a default symbol of pervasive commerce, of sleepless advertisement, of a permanent “on” mode of being, perennially open to transaction.

Radiance reaches further back into our modern obsession with sight. The rhetoric of illumination and clarity has long supported the human desire to see, to discover, to champion objectivity and reason, to extend the project of enlightenment, to expose zones of darkness, to rectify ravines of unreason.

Away from its associations with civilization, technocracy and global hyperconsumerism, the dazzle of modern light could be regarded alongside its dialectical opposite—the realm of the unexposed, the undisclosed, the self-veiled. Otherworlds of opacity and indefinability, with traces of unofficial histories and private observations, are activated around the blithe shine of the works. Across the gallery, presence and concealment fuse, glowing into a world of their own, where shadows tease and tempt, while relentlessly refusing, silver interpretation.

In this exhibition:

Ly Hoàng Ly repeats a pattern of sunken solidity, fabricating a threshold between stability and precarity / Trương Công Tùng transmits the unseeable from under the erosive shrouds of time / Đỉnh Q. Lê remixes revolutionary boilerplates with symbols of wealth in a sardonic sculpture-text / Orawan Arunrak meditates on the sacred light and routines that keep humans praying, wishing / Nguyễn Kim Tố Lan presents a faceless figure—a silhouette, a corpse, an apparition—floating across possibilities of reincarnation / Phan Thảo Nguyên embraces “dreadful optimism” on the wings of ideology and reveries / Nguyễn Phương Linh conjures an emptied nail salon, a menacing space of transformation / Richard Streitmatter-Trần proposes a perception of Saigon as a season where memories grow, wither, incessantly flicker / ƯuĐàm Trần Nguyễn sketches a terribly quiet scream, an elongated longing for somewhere unknown, a telegram for whom, who could know

Curation: Sàn ArtDesign & Production: Nhật Q. VõExhibition Text: Nguyễn Hoàng Quyên

Once again, a resonant thank-you to the artists who have supported our fundraiser, the generous humans who have either donated an existing artwork or submitted an idea (a sketch, a shape, a photograph, a line of text, a single word) for us to materialize into light.

LINK

The Sap Stills Runs, A duo exhibition featuring Freddy Nadolny Poustochkine and Trương Công Tùng, 24.04.2019 – 24.06.2019, San Art, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

The duo exhibition The Sap Still Runs, organized by Sàn Art and the Institut Français in Vietnam, is a gathering of personal poetics by Freddy Nadolny Poustochkine and Trương Công Tùng.

Comic-book artist and Art Labor Collective collaborator Freddy Nadolny Poustochkine presents a collection of gouache sketchbook and video diaries that document memories of, and intimacies with, the sprawling conurbations, sensuous landscapes and nameless faces that the artist has passed in Sài Gòn and Buôn Ma Thuột over the years. Poustochkine has been incubating this diaristic travelogue during his previous stays in Vietnam and most recently, a residency at Villa Saigon.

Trương Công Tùng, in a metaphysical dream-dialogue with Freddy Nadlny Poustochkine, transmits into the space an uncanny body of installation works, utilizing media ranging from gently appropriated or archived organisms—a seared tree root, a string of wooden praying beads, a filmic segment of ghostly insects on the wing—to an ethnographic text on indigenous beliefs from the Central Highlands of Vietnam. Patiently collecting and tinkering with found materials, the artist works through realities of extractivism and ephemerality across the now fragile highland forests and from a more expansive spatio-temporal dimension, across the historical strata of (neo)coloniality in the context of Vietnam.

The Sap Still Runs takes its conceptual inspiration from a picture of a felled pine tree in the Cévennes of France, an incident Freddy Nadolny Poustochkine encountered by chance and believed to be a vital resonance with the sight of devalued rubber trees being truncated en masse in the Central Highlands, a cyclical phenomenon he’d learned through Trương Công Tùng’s practice of salvaging and metamorphosing tree corpses into works of art in Jarai Province, Vietnam. As vertical forests transform into severed bodies on the ground, their sap, bearing the spirit, or the soan[1], of the trees, continue to spill and permeate the environment, this time, in the guise of creations and gestures embedded in the exhibition space, a mediating apparatus separate from the remote terrains where the artists first witnessed their own scenes of deracination.

[1] The cosmology around the spirit or “soan” is learned from Les populations montagnardes du Sud-Indochinois, a book authored by Jacques Dournes, a Christian-missionary-cum-ethnographer widely translated in Vietnam. Dournes devoted the book’s final chapter, “L’âme et les songes,” to legends, tales and discussions on the Central Highlanders’ worldview that all visible forms are pictures (rup) of invisible spirits (soan). The book is translated by Nguyên Ngọc into Vietnamese under the title Miền Đất Huyền Ảo, meaning Magical Land.

Where The Sea Remembers, The Mistake Room, Los Angeles, July 13 - October 12, 2019

Where The Sea Remembers is a project—comprised of an exhibition, a program series, and a website—that explores contemporary art in and about Vietnam through the practices of artists who live and work there and across its diasporas. This project marks the launch of an institutional initiative aimed at fostering exchanges and collaborations between The Mistake Room and independent peer institutions in Vietnam. The goal of this work is to create opportunities that cultivate and support an emerging generation of Vietnamese artists, writers, and curators in order to encourage the creation of scholarship that expands what we know about local and regional art histories and how we come to know it.

The result of ongoing conversations with artist friends and colleagues in Vietnam and others living elsewhere who are invested in the country’s artistic communities, Where The Sea Remembers is conceived as the starting point of an inquiry rather than its culmination. As such, it acknowledges and embraces its incompleteness in an attempt to re-imagine the function of the regionally-based exhibition format. Conscious that exhibitions have often throughout history been put to the service of nation-building, Where The Sea Remembers thinks of the nation not as a static geographic locale or even a diasporic imaginary but rather as a complex set of tense and evolving individual relationships between people and their ideas of a homeland. Thus, the artworks in the show and the contributions of program participants and commissioned writers are gathered as a dispatch of multiple perspectives rather than as a defining survey.

The project’s title is largely inspired by the name of a song widely known amongst people who fled Vietnam after the end of the war in 1975. Written by poet and musician Trịnh Công Sơn, Biển Nhớ, or The Sea Remembers, was often sung as a farewell by those staying behind in the refugee camps to those who were discharged and relocated. The song’s famous refrain, “Tomorrow you leave,” foregrounds the painful separation of exile, yet as scholar Yến Lê Espirituhas written, its invocation of a place—its mountains, sands, and willows—creates a bond that forever connects those who have gone to the lands they left behind. It is here, between the countries we knew and the homelands we choose to inhabit that Where The Sea Remembers locates a contemporary experience of nationhood. One that is always forged by partial choices, acts of distancing and affiliation, and creative tactics of world-making.

Where The Sea Remembers is a project—comprised of an exhibition, a program series, and a website—that explores contemporary art in and about Vietnam through the practices of artists who live and work there and across its diasporas. This project marks the launch of an institutional initiative aimed at fostering exchanges and collaborations between The Mistake Room and independent peer institutions in Vietnam. The goal of this work is to create opportunities that cultivate and support an emerging generation of Vietnamese artists, writers, and curators in order to encourage the creation of scholarship that expands what we know about local and regional art histories and how we come to know it.

The result of ongoing conversations with artist friends and colleagues in Vietnam and others living elsewhere who are invested in the country’s artistic communities, Where The Sea Remembers is conceived as the starting point of an inquiry rather than its culmination. As such, it acknowledges and embraces its incompleteness in an attempt to re-imagine the function of the regionally-based exhibition format. Conscious that exhibitions have often throughout history been put to the service of nation-building, Where The Sea Remembers thinks of the nation not as a static geographic locale or even a diasporic imaginary but rather as a complex set of tense and evolving individual relationships between people and their ideas of a homeland. Thus, the artworks in the show and the contributions of program participants and commissioned writers are gathered as a dispatch of multiple perspectives rather than as a defining survey.

The project’s title is largely inspired by the name of a song widely known amongst people who fled Vietnam after the end of the war in 1975. Written by poet and musician Trịnh Công Sơn, Biển Nhớ, or The Sea Remembers, was often sung as a farewell by those staying behind in the refugee camps to those who were discharged and relocated. The song’s famous refrain, “Tomorrow you leave,” foregrounds the painful separation of exile, yet as scholar Yến Lê Espirituhas written, its invocation of a place—its mountains, sands, and willows—creates a bond that forever connects those who have gone to the lands they left behind. It is here, between the countries we knew and the homelands we choose to inhabit that Where The Sea Remembers locates a contemporary experience of nationhood. One that is always forged by partial choices, acts of distancing and affiliation, and creative tactics of world-making.

LINK

Constructing Mythologies, Edouard Malingue gallery, Hongkong Sep 13 - Oct 18 2018

Curated by Caroline Ha Thuc

Every society is based on strong systems of belief that are part of our culture and daily lives. These beliefs become mythologies when they are constructed and nourished by a discourse – verbal or visual – generated and appropriated by the society we live in and by its system of communication.

This exhibition aims to explore the social construction of certain mythologies in Cambodia, China, Myanmar and Vietnam, in particular. These countries have deeply relied, and still do, on official narratives, developing and supporting fictional discourses in order to promote dominant State ideology and to obscure some parts of reality and history. Some mythologies thus serve specific political agendas while others are generated by collective beliefs – the global capitalist system, for instance – and grow and subsist beyond national boundaries. They can both invigorate society or limit its scope of expression. In response to these myths, art opposes its own fictional and independent discourses.

Everything can actually become a myth, everywhere: the five featured artists reflect on this ongoing dynamism that is constantly at work and shapes our vision of the world.

Truong Cong Tung and Khvay Samnang’s works are responding to each other. They question the encounter between two opposite mythologies that cohabit in rural areas in Southeast Asia. These lands are often the territory of sacred places and spirits, the cradle for mythical and traditional beliefs transmitted by diverse ethnic minorities who have been living there for centuries in harmony with nature. Today, with the intensive exploitation of land and rapid deforestation, traditions are waning and these ancient beliefs are threatened. However, they seem to be somehow replaced by another set of beliefs based on the rhetoric of modernity and prosperity, built by the State and by private development companies.

Truong’s installation and sculptures embody this cultural confrontation, combining hybrid found objects made of newly sacralised elements and natural parts, mingling local cosmologies with imposed technologies. His work is deeply informed by the traditional values of his native region of the Central Highlands in Vietnam.

Khvay’s video and masks are the outcome of the artist’s quasi-ethnographic encounter with the Cambodian Chong community, an ethnic minority living in the Areng Valley and known as one of Southeast Asia’s last great wilderness areas. Together with choreographer Rady Nget, the artist reflects on the animist beliefs of this population magnifying the empowerment and agency of a nature endowed with its own interiority and subjectivity. Their representation somehow echoes the myth of a Golden Age when harmony existed between nature and all creatures, a discourse reactivated today in resistance to ecological threats and the contemporary breakup with nature.

Born to an Indian-Burmese family, Maung Day, who is both poet and artist, scrutinises the official Burmese discourse aimed at excluding minorities and fostering violence, exploring in particular the dark side of the Buddhist belief system in Myanmar. In this series of new drawings, he hints at the institutionalisation of Buddhism by the Burmese military State and emphasises how the religion has become an instrument of its ultranationalist policies used to activate and justify violence. The ancient Buddhist tales have henceforth been diverted and stripped of all their meaningful content. Leaving all interpretations open, the artist proposes his own absurd mythologies.

Thao Phan-Nguyen’s response to political mythologies and beliefs is a set of poetic tales based on her artistic and free interpretation of history and popular stories. The time and place of her video are fictive but the work refers to the agrarian reforms that took place in Vietnam in the 1950s and to the Romanisation of written Vietnamese by French Jesuit Alexandre de Rhodes. The tone of the video and the style of her drawings are falsely naïve: beyond political utopias and dreamlike aspirations lies the reign of manipulation, dictatorship and cruelties.

These ambiguities and tensions feature also in the paintings by Chinese artist Wang Zhibo whose work remains on the edge between fiction and reality. Reaching reality is actually just another mythology since beliefs and reality are constantly and tightly entwined. The Chinese painter addresses these complex issues with her usual sense of humour against the backdrop of a ubiquitous system of power.

LINK

Between Fragmentation and Wholeness, Galerie Quynh, Ho Chi Minh City, May 24 – June 30 2018

“Between Fragmentation and Wholeness” refers to The Wholeness and the Implicate Order (1980), a book authored by David Bohm, a distinguished physicist in the field of quantum theory. Influential beyond his own discipline, notably in philosophy and art, Bohm was recognized for his application of physics on the rationale of human consciousness and the universe. According to Bohm, the universe has an implicate order in which it enfolds and unfolds to extend into infinite dimensionality. Everything is connected within this unbroken wholeness and any individual element can reveal detailed information about every other element in the universe. Truong’s exhibition is an analogy to Bohm’s concept. It is his consciousness of the wholeness of his inner self and his surroundings that unfolds fragmented elements of the self, family, region, country and extensively the world. Truong makes sense of the nonsense, connecting the non-aligned, and entwines it through time and space to create a nonlinear wholeness.

“Between Fragmentation and Wholeness” invites viewers to enter Truong Cong Tung’s multidimensional reality through three main axes in the gallery space: vertically – with the ruptures in urban planning and propagated doctrine; horizontally – with mystical human-altered landscapes in agrarian territories; and diagonally – with a mirage of blazing images extracted from the virtual domain. The bodies of works appear in various mediums from collaged sculptures of natural and manmade objects to video installations and layered drawings in light boxes. All contribute to a powerful language of semiotics – of self -indicated signs – which moves beyond the mimesis of nature. Departing from his own personal context of the Central Highlands and Saigon, Vietnam, Truong Cong Tung proposes an understanding of the totality of humanity where our linear modernization unfolds, mimics, adjusts and then disrupts nature – not just the natural world but also the human desire for collectivism and harmony.

There will be exhibition tours with the Curator on Saturday, the 2nd of June at 3pm (Vietnamese) and 5pm (English) as well as an artist talk at the gallery on Saturday, the 23 June at 5pm (bilingual). Please contact the gallery if you should like more details on its educational programming.

Galerie Quynh

118 Nguyen Van Thu, Dakao, Dist 1, HCMC

Tel: (84 28) 3822 7218

Gallery hours: Tuesday – Saturday, 10 AM – 7 PM; closed Sundays and Mondays