past Exhibitions

Recap of the lecture:

Following an excerpt of What about China? (Part I of II, 2020–21), her newest film, Trinh will read from her film script. This point of departure will bring Trinh’s multivocal practice in conversation with the curatorial and spatial concept of this exhibition.

BIOGRAPHY

Trinh T. Minh-ha (Vietnam/United States) is Professor of Rhetoric and of Gender & Women’s Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Originally trained as a musical composer, she received her two masters and PhD from the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana. Her numerous books include Lovecidal. Walking with The Disappeared (2016), D-Passage. The Digital Way (2013), Elsewhere, Within Here (2011). Her work has been recipient of many awards, including the Wild Dreamer Lifetime Achievement Award at the Subversive Festival, Zagreb (2014); the Lifetime Achievement Award from Women’s Caucus for Art (2012); and the 2006 Trailblazers Award at the MIPDoc in Cannes.

Ute Meta Bauer (Germany/Singapore) is the Founding Director of the NTU CCA Singapore, and Professor, School of Art, Design and Media, NTU, Singapore. Previously, she was Associate Professor in the Department of Architecture at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, where she also served as Founding Director of the MIT Program in Art, Culture, and Technology (2005–13). For more than three decades, Bauer has curated exhibitions and presentations, connecting contemporary art, film, video, and sound through transdisciplinary formats including Documenta11 (2002), 3rd Berlin biennale for contemporary art (2004), and the US Pavilion for the 56th Venice Biennale (2015). 

Image: Trinh T. Minh-ha, What about China? (Part I of II), 2020–21, film still. Courtesy Moongift Films.

Visitors to the Exhibition Hall at our Centre can encounter Trinh T. Minh-ha’s extensive writing, core to her practice, through these books as displayed on the reading platforms along the passageway connecting the five theatres.

Books by Trinh T. Minh-ha

Trinh, T. Minh-ha. Cinema Interval. New York and London: Routledge, 1999.

Trinh, T. Minh-ha. D-passage: The Digital Way. Durham: Duke University Press, 2013.

Trinh, T. Minh-ha. Elsewhere, Within Here: Immigration, Refugeeism and the Boundary Event. New York and London: Routledge, 2011.

Trinh, T. Minh-ha. Framer Framed: Film Scripts and Interviews. New York and London: Routledge, 1992.

Trinh, T. Minh-ha. Lovecidal: Walking with the Disappeared. New York: Fordham University Press, 2016.

Trinh, T. Minh-ha. The Digital Film Event. New York and London: Routledge, 2005.

Trinh, T. Minh-ha. When the Moon Waxes Red. Representation, Gender and Cultural Politics. New York and London: Routledge, 1991.

Trinh, T. Minh-ha. Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989.

ONLINE RESOURCES:

Van Dienderen, An. “Indirect Flow through Passages: Trinh T. Minh-ha’s Art Practice.” Afterall: A Journal of Art, Context and Inquiry 23 (Spring 2010): 90–97.  [Free access upon registration]

Duong, Lan, and Lila Sharif. “Displaced Subjects: Revolution, Film, and Women in Viet Nam and Palestine.” Verge: Studies in Global Asias 6, no. 1 (Spring 2020): 168–97. [Free access upon registration]

Trinh, T. Minh-ha. “Forgetting Vietnam: Trinh T. Minh-ha with Lucie Kim-Chi Mercier.” By Lucie Kim-Chi Mercier. Radical Philosophy 2.03 (December 2018): 78–89. [Access PDF]

Fuser, Marina. “Nomadism in the Cinema of Trinh T. Minh-ha.” PhD diss., University of Sussex, 2019. [Access PDF] 

Trinh, T. Minh-ha. “Shifting the Borders of the Other: An Interview with Trinh T. Minh-ha.” By Marina Grzinic. Telepolis. August 12, 1988. [View here]

Hill, Michael. “Abandoned to Difference: Identity, Opposition and Trinh T. Minh-ha’s Reassemblage.” Surfaces 3, no. 2 (1993): 1–29. https://doi.org/10.7202/1065095ar. [Access PDF]

Lawson, Jacqueline. “Gender and the War: Men, Women and Vietnam.” Vietnam Generation 1, no.3, Article 1 (1989). [Access PDF] 

Trinh, T. Minh-ha. “Documentary Is/Not a Name.” October 52 (Spring 1990): 76–98. doi:10.2307/778886. [Access PDF]

Trinh, T. Minh-ha. “Not You/Like You: Post-colonial Women and the Interlocking Questions of Identity and Difference.” Inscriptions 3 (1988): 71–77. [Access PDF] 

Trinh, T. Minh-ha. “The Totalizing Quest of Meaning.” Theorizing Documentary 1 (1993): 90–107. [Access PDF] 

Trinh, T. Minh-ha. “Trinh T. Minh-ha with Benjamin Schultz-Figueroa and Patricia Alvarez.” By Benjamin Schultz-Figueroa and Patricia Alvarez. The Brooklyn Rail. October, 2016. [View here] 

Image: Courtesy Trinh T. Minh-ha.

This reading group session will be held on Zoom. Sign up here to receive the link and password.

Inspired by the commentary and writings of novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen, this reading group explores the overlapping concepts related to immigration and transnationalism. Moving between reportage, criticism and fiction, it will explore how the framing of good or bad immigrants is intimately tied to questions of belonging, otherness, identity, and empathy. It draws on the archetypal literary figure of the antihero to challenge underlying prejudices, and locate counter-images embodying a more fluid way of identifying with transnational experiences around the world.

Billy Tang (United Kingdom/China) is a Senior Curator at the Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai.

Image: Trinh T. Minh-ha, Shoot for the Contents, 1991, film still. Courtesy the artist.

Recap of the lecture:

Special attention in the accompanying film programme has been given to Trinh’s approach of the withdrawal from the usual pattern of the documentary with regard to authenticity, representation, observation, or the creation of sentiments in favor of non-linear storytelling in which the documentary appears as a performance. This conversation will focus on key aspects in Trinh’s work, and their correlation to the films selected for the programme.

Screening is over.

the time is now. (I+II), Heidrun Holzfeind, 2019
Colour, sound, 48 min
Rating: PG

Holzfeind is interested in architectural and social utopias that create an alternative living. She documents the shamanistic rituals of the Japanese improvisation/noise duo IRO, Toshio and Shizuko Orimo, in what they call “Punk Kagura”—in reference to Kagura, a ritual dance tradition and music for the gods. Holzfeind uses a visual language that adapts their mystical rituals: breaks in image; as well as the colour and narrative corresponding with the soundscape, the modernist architecture of Takamasa Yosizaka, and the surrounding nature in which the duo performs a choreography for healing our damaged planet. The urgency is underlined in the title the time is now. 

This film is part of the Film Programme: Speaking / Thinking Nearby, co-curated by Dr Marc Glöde, Assistant Professor, NTU ADM, and Dr Ella Raidel, Assistant Professor, NTU ADM and WKWSCI, and accompanies the exhibition, Trinh T. Minh-ha. Films. 

Film introduction by Dr Ella Raidel

Interview with filmmaker Heidrun Holzfeind.

BIOGRAPHY

Heidrun Holzfeind (Austria/Germany), an artist and filmmaker, explores the interrelations between history and identity, individual histories and political narratives of the present.

Image: the time is now. (I+II), Heidrun Holzfeind, 2019, film still. Courtesy Heidrun Holzfeind and Sixpackfilm.

This reading group will be held over three modules with each consisting of two sessions discussing a selection of texts on related topics. Participants are highly encouraged to attend both sessions for each module to ensure continuity and quality of discourse.

Sign up here to attend Module 1, Module 2 or Module 3.

Led by visual artist and writer Nurul Huda Rashid and film scholar Phoebe Pua, both PhD candidates, National University of Singapore.

This reading group takes ideas central to Trinh T. Minh-Ha’s writing as points of access to raise questions about the imagined histories, geographies, and communities of Southeast Asia. Over six sessions, the group will discuss themes of storytelling, feminism, and identities, and explore terms such as “third world,” “nusantara,” “woman,” and “native” with an eye towards interpreting them as acts and articulations of counter-narrative.

Module 1
10 & 24 November 2020, 5.30 – 7pm

‘The Storytellers’ focuses on the medium and method of narratives. Both sessions in this module consider how storytelling becomes an instrument of strategy in constructing geographies, histories, identities.

Session A

‘Un/sound design’ eavesdrops on Trinh T. Minh-ha’s theories on film sound. The reading group will discuss the chapter “Holes in the Sound Wall” (from When the Moon Waxes Red, 1991) as an introduction to Trinh’s experimental disregard for sonic conventions. We will examine the role of sound design in radical storytelling. This chapter will also be discussed in relation to Singapore GaGa (1995), a 55-minute documentary by Singaporean filmmaker Tan Pin Pin.

Session B

‘Locating History’ is an exercise in contemplating history alongside existing tropes of research and representation. The session will discuss readings by Linda Tuhiwai Smith, “Twenty-five Indigenous Projects” and excerpts from Ariella Azoulay’s “Unlearning Imperialism”. Positioned as decolonial and de-imperial projects in their approaches to re-historicising narratives, it will consider possibilities in re-locating the contexts of image and place in Trinh’s work within the region.

REGISTER

Module 2
8 & 22 December 2020, 5.30 – 7pm

‘new feminism, who dis?’ begins with a selection of Trinh T. Minh-ha’s writing on feminism and womanhood from the 1990s. Both sessions in this module seek to read these texts as points of departure to consider what feminism is, looks like, does, and means in the context of contemporary Southeast Asia.

Session A

‘Re-reading Woman, Native, Other’ revisits one of Trinh’s most well-known ideas: the triple bind. As a self-identified Third World woman intellectual working and living in the United States, Trinh is insistent on the need to cross borders of identities and practice self-location. The session asks if her argument remains relevant for feminists today; most immediately, in the context of Southeast Asia, does the Third World woman still exist and, if so, how might she relate to the feminism of her own country’s cosmopolitan capitals? Instead of reading Trinh’s book Woman, Native, Other (1989), the group will read a dialogue between Trinh and filmmaker-writer Pratibha Parmar conducted shortly after the book’s publication titled ‘Woman, Native, Other: A Dialogue between Pratibha Parmar and Trinh T. Minh ha’ (1990).

Session B

‘Toward Feminist Turns’ explores new feminist methods of annotating, intervening, and radicalising against/alongside narratives about women in SouthEast Asia. Sampling excerpts from the feminist archival turn, digital and data feminism, and movements, this session will re-encounter new feminisms through new interfaces and technologies of mobilising. How do we gather from a global feminist approach? How are these articulated through practices in art and research? How do we begin to retell stories of Southeast Asian women today?

REGISTER

Module 3
2 & 16 February 2021, 5.30 – 7pm

‘Citizens of Elsewhere’ is concerned with the difficult questions pertaining to placeness, belonging, and legitimacy–topics that have recurred in Trinh T. Minh-ha’s writing and films over the decades.

Session A

‘In-between’ engages with the often unwieldy epistemological implications of calling a place ‘home’. The group will read the chapter ‘Far Away, From Home’ (from Elsewhere, Within Here, 2011) and discuss Trinh T. Minh-ha’s inclination toward rupturing the image of home as static and singular in order to accommodate its possibility as shifting and serial. The discussion will also consider our collective and individual rights to lay claim to, allow, and negate a call to home. The chapter will also be discussed in relation to Fifth Cinema (2018), a 56-minute essay film by Hanoi-based filmmaker Nguyễn Trinh Thi.

Session B

‘Siapa di nusantara?’ will focus on reimagining identities in relation to placeness. The nusantara summons a historical geography that connected land and sea, gathering different ethnicities and beliefs with the aim of offering alternatives to nationalists’ boundaries of nation-states. This session will bring into question the porous dimensions of identity when dislocated from fixtures of land, nation and state, and rethink identity through oceanic affinities. A visual repository of images will be introduced to re-read ways we classify and respond to Trinh’s films: as escapes into ways of reimagining geographies of self, to invoke a sense of familiarity, and de-imperialize ways of seeing. Note: Reading group materials are accessible after registration.

REGISTER

BIOGRAPHY

Phoebe Pua (Singapore) is a PhD candidate with the Department of English Language and Literature at NUS. Her dissertation is concerned with the controversial figure of the third world woman, as seen particularly in contemporary films from Southeast Asia. 

Nurul Huda Rashid (Singapore) is a PhD candidate in Cultural Studies at NUS. Her research interests focus on images, narratives, visual and sentient bodies, feminisms, and the intersections between them.

Image: Trinh T. Minh-ha, Forgetting Vietnam, 2015, film still. Courtesy the artist.

Explore the art of movie soundtracks with Lim as she breaks down the layers of audio behind film sequences, showing you how dialogue, foley, ambience and sound effects add to the action. Then, apply these principles and create your own soundscape for a film scene.

Workshop fee: $12
Register via Peatix: thefilmicsoundtrack.peatix.com 

BIOGRAPHY

Lim Ting Li (Singapore) is a multi award winning sound designer. She was conferred the National Arts Council’s Young Artist Award in 2018 and is currently the Director of Sound at Mocha Chai Laboratories.

Image courtesy Mocha Chai Laboratories.

Screening is over.

Surname Viet Given Name Nam, Trinh T. Minh-ha, 1989
16mm film transferred to digital, colour, sound, 108 min
Rating: PG13 (This film contains some disturbing scenes from the archival footage of the Vietnam War)

This film is Trinh’s complex deep dive into the difficulties of translation, as well as themes of exile or dislocation. By using historic material, dance, printed texts, folk poetry and combining it with anecdotal narratives, she examines the status of Vietnamese women since the Vietnam War, as well as the status of images as evidence. It is a complex approach that invites the audience to reflect on the modes of perception and encourages a profound critique of audio-visual strategies.

This film is part of the Film Programme: Speaking / Thinking Nearby, co-curated by Dr Marc Glöde, Assistant Professor, NTU ADM, and Dr Ella Raidel, Assistant Professor, NTU ADM and WKWSCI, and accompanies the exhibition, Trinh T. Minh-ha. Films.

Video introduction by Dr Marc Glöde

BIOGRAPHY

Trinh T. Minh-ha (Vietnam/United States) is Professor of Rhetoric and of Gender & Women’s Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Originally trained as a musical composer, she received her two masters and PhD from the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana. Her numerous books include Lovecidal. Walking with The Disappeared (2016), D-Passage. The Digital Way (2013), Elsewhere, Within Here (2011). Her work has been recipient of many awards, including the Wild Dreamer Lifetime Achievement Award at the Subversive Festival, Zagreb (2014); the Lifetime Achievement Award from Women’s Caucus for Art (2012); and the 2006 Trailblazers Award at the MIPDoc in Cannes.

Image: Trinh T. Minh-ha, Surname Viet Given Name Nam, 1989, film still. Courtesy the artist.

In Trinh T. Minh-ha’s newest work What About China? (Part I of II, 2020–2021), Xiaolu Guo reads from her memoir Nine Continents: A Memoir In and Out of China (2017) as a voice-over. Reflecting on her childhood, her early career in the Beijing art world, and her current life in Europe, aspects of which are chronicled in her films and novels as well as in her memoir, this (de)Tour focuses on the relationship between memories and art practice.

Guo’s presentation will be followed by a conversation between her, Ute Meta Bauer, Founding Director, NTU CCA Singapore and Professor, NTU School of Art, Design and Media, and Dr Sim Wai Chew, Associate Professor, NTU School of Humanities.

Co-presented with NTU School of Humanities and the Asia Creative Writing Programme

BIOGRAPHY

Xiaolu Guo/郭小橹 (China/United Kingdom) is a novelist, essayist and filmmaker. A graduate of the Beijing Film Academy and the UK National Film and Television School, she has worked both in Europe and China in cinema and literature. She is one of the inaugural fellows of the Columbia Institute of Ideas and Imagination in Paris and a jury member for the Man Booker Prize 2019. Named as a Granta Best of Young British Novelists in 2013, she has written eight books, directed eleven features and documentaries, and won numerous awards. Her novels include A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers (2007) and I Am China (2014). Her memoir Once Upon A Time In The East (2017) won the National Book Critics Circle Award 2017 and was shortlisted for the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize and Costa Book Awards. Her most recent novel, A Lover’s Discourse (2020), was shortlisted for The Goldsmiths Prize 2020.

Her feature film, The Concrete Revolution (2004) won the Grand Prix,  International Human Rights Film Festival, Paris, and Special Jury Prize, EBS International Documentary Film Festival, Seoul, both in 2005. How Is Your Fish Today? (2006), Sundance Film Festival 2006 Official Selection, received the Grand Jury Prize for Best Feature Fiction Film, International Women Film Festival, Paris, and special mention for the Netpac Tiger Awards, Lino Miccichè Award, and Jury Prize at the Rotterdam Film Festival, Pesaro Film Festival, and Fribourg International Film Festival respectively in 2007. She, A Chinese (2009), Toronto and Pusan Film Festivals Official Selections 2009, received the Golden Leopard Award at the Locarno International Film Festival and Montblanc Scriptwriting Award at the Hamburg Film Festival, in the same year. Once Upon A Time Proletarian (2009), Venice, Toronto and Pusan Film Festivals Official Selections 2009 and TIFF 2010, received Special Jury Award, Cines del Sur Film Festival, Granada, New Directors/New Films, MoMA, New York, both 2008, and the Grand Prix de Genève 2011. UFO In Her Eyes (2011), TIFF 2011, was awarded the second prize for the City of Venice Award, 70^a Mostra Internazionale d’Arte Cinematografica, Venice, 2013.

Guo had her film retrospective at Whitechapel Gallery, London (2019), and Cinémathèque Suisse, Lausanne (2011). She was a visiting professor at Columbia University, New York, and is currently a writer-in-residence at Baruch College, The City University of New York.