Pictures. The question of crossbreeding between Vietnam and Senegal by Tuan Andrew Nguyen

In images, in pictures In a striking back-and-forth between two former French colonies, artist Tuan Andrew Nguyen explores questions of memory and the identities of the colonized through devices using videos and sculptures.

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In his video installation “The Specter of Ancestors in the Making”, the artist Tuan Andrew Nguyen, born in 1976 in Vietnam, tells a little-known fragment of French colonial history: that of the Senegalese riflemen who fought for France in Indochina and returned home with their Vietnamese wives and mixed-race children.

In today’s Dakar, the artist met the descendants of these Vietnamese-Senegalese families. If the history of colonization has forgotten these uprooted soldiers and women, the work done with Tuan Andrew Nguyen allows them to break with the silence and the legacy of colonial prejudices.

Presented at the Sharjah Contemporary Art Biennale in 2019 and then at those in Berlin, Dakar and Tokyo, the installation consists of four video screens showing archive images and fictional conversations between the ancestors of these Vietnamese-Senegalese descendants. The viewer is invited to wander through this device and ” to go up “ his own film. A way for everyone to experience memory fragmentation.

For descendants, this creation is a “offering to the ancestors”, says Tuan Andrew Nguyen. Affirming the power of imagination, filling the silences of personal stories, this collective work reveals in filigree the impact of colonial history on millions of colonized people.

BIO EXPRESS

Mr. Andrew Nguyen was born in 1976 in Vietnam. He explores questions of memory and colonial identities through video installations and sculptures.