Trinh T. Minh-ha. Films.
Forgetting Vietnam (2015)
Night Passage (2004)
The Fourth Dimension (2001)
A Tale of Love (1995)
Shoot for the Contents (1991)
What about China? (Part I of II, 2020–21)
“The making of each film transforms the way I see myself and the world. Once I start engaging in the process of making a film or in any artistic excursion, I am also embarking upon a journey whose point of arrival is unknown to me.”—Trinh T. Minh-ha
Trinh T. Minh-ha. Films. is the first institutional exhibition of filmmaker, music composer, writer, anthropologist, feminist and postcolonial theorist Trinh T. Minh-ha in Asia, presented in an exhibition format. Five of her films—Forgetting Vietnam (2015), Night Passage (2004), The Fourth Dimension (2001), A Tale of Love (1995) and Shoot for the Contents (1991), filmed over a quarter of a century, in different parts of Asia—are simultaneously on view in five small-scale movie theatres in The Exhibition Hall. As the viewer wanders from one theatre to the next, the proximity of the films enables their narratives to interrelate. This spatial configuration took its point of departure from Trinh’s exhibition at the Secession, Vienna, in 2001.
Forgetting Vietnam, framed by two ancient Vietnamese myths, was made in commemoration of the 40th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam war, touching on the memory of trauma. Night Passage, inspired by Miyazawa Kenji’s novel Milky Way Railroad (1927), narrates the spiritual journey of a young female immigrant and her two companions, into a world of in-between realities. Shot in Japan, The Fourth Dimension is Trinh’s first digital film. Using special video effects to composite images and sound in multiple layers, this film is an exploration of time through rituals of religion and culture, new technology and everyday reality. A Tale of Love is a retelling of 19th-century Vietnamese poem The Tale of Kiều (1820), through a modern-day Vietnamese immigrant in the United States. In this film, Trinh experiments with various cinematic techniques and elements. Shoot for the Contents, an excursion into allegories, explores cultural and political shifts in China, as refracted by the June Fourth incident in Beijing.
Presented in the Centre’s Single Screen from 31 October 2020 is Trinh’s newest cinematic work, What about China? (Part I of II, 2020–21). Initiated by NTU CCA Singapore, and co-commissioned with Rockbund Art Museum (RAM), Shanghai, the film takes the notion of harmony in China as a site of creative manifestation, and draws from footage shot in 1993 and 1994, in Eastern and Southern China, specifically from provinces Anhui, Hubei, Zhejiang, Fujian and Guangxi—linked to the remote origins of Chinese civilisation.
Through Trinh T. Minh-ha. Writings., a display of Trinh’s books on reading platforms along the passageway connecting the five theatres in The Exhibition Hall, as well as Why are they so afraid of a lotus?, presented in The Lab by CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts (Wattis), San Francisco, that showcases its year-long research season on her multifaceted practice, viewers are able to encounter her extensive writing that is core to her practice.
Trinh’s early films, Surname Viet Given Name Nam (1989), Naked Spaces—Living is Round (1985), and Reassemblage (1982), are part of an online film programme, Speaking / Thinking Nearby. Other films selected echo strands of discussions in Trinh’s layered practice, ranging from ethics of representation, to aspects of migration, global socio-politics, and feminism.
Besides the film programme Speaking / Thinking Nearby, other public programmes include Mother Always Has a Mother, an online convening presented by the Centre, Wattis, and RAM, and “There is no such thing as documentary”, a conference that brings together filmmakers, film historians, and curators to question the politics embedded in presentation and representation, perception, context, and the spatial.
This is NTU CCA Singapore’s final presentation in its current exhibition space, its opening coinciding with the Centre’s seventh anniversary. By the end of this exhibition, the Centre would have hosted 55 exhibitions since its inception in 2013, inaugurated by the show Paradise Lost (2014), featuring works by Trinh T. Minh-ha alongside those of Zarina Bhimji and Fiona Tan.
Trinh T. Minh-ha (Vietnam/United States) is Professor of Gender & Women’s Studies and of Rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley, and an award-winning artist and filmmaker. She grew up in South Vietnam during the Vietnam War and pursued her education at the National Conservatory of Music and Theater in Ho Chi Minh City. In 1970, she migrated to the United States where she continued her studies in music composition, ethnomusicology, and French literature at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She embarked on a career as an educator and has taught in diverse disciplines which brought her to the National Conservatory of Music in Dakar, Senegal, where she shot her first film, Reassemblage. Trinh’s cinematic oeuvre has been featured in numerous exhibitions and film festivals. She has participated in biennales across the globe including Documenta11, Kassel (2002), and most recently at Manifesta 13, Marseille (2020). A prolific writer, she has authored nine books.
Trinh T. Minh-ha. Films. is curated by Ute Meta Bauer (Germany/Singapore), Founding Director, NTU CCA Singapore, and Professor, NTU ADM.
This project focuses on the multi-layered practice of Trinh T. Minh-ha as a filmmaker, writer, music composer and educator, generating a multi-year (2019–2022) research and programme partnership between NTU CCA Singapore, RAM, Wattis, and the Württembergischer Kunstverein Stuttgart.
For more information on the overview of Trinh T. Minh-ha. Films. public programmes, click here.
Image: 1 and 2. Trinh T. Minh-ha, Forgetting Vietnam, film still, 2015, colour, 90 min. Courtesy the artist. 3. Trinh T. Minh-ha, Shoot for the Contents, film still, 1991, 102 min. Courtesy the artist. 4. Trinh T. Minh-ha, Surname Viet Given Name Nam, film still, 1989, 108 min. Courtesy the artist.
Public programmes

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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.

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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.
Dissanayake, Wimal. Rethinking Third Cinema. New York: Taylor & Francis Ltd, 2003.
Ferguson, Russell, Martha Gever, Trinh T. Minh-Ha and Cornel West. Out There: Marginalisation and Contemporary Culture. Cambridge: The MIT Press Ltd, 1992.
Foster, Gwendolyn Audrey. Women Filmmakers of the African & Asian Diaspora: Decolonizing the Gaze, Locating Subjectivity. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University, 1997.
Guo, Xiaolu. Nine Continents: A Memoir In and Out of China. New York: Grove Press, 2017.
Kaplan, F. and E. Ann. Feminism and Film. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.
Lorde, Audre. Sister Outsider: essays and speeches. Berkeley: Crossing Press, 2014.
Pines, Jim, and Willemen, Paul. Questions of third cinema. London: BFI Pub, 1989.
Rhomberg, Kathrin, ed. Trinh T. Minh-Ha / Secession. Vienna: Association of Visual Artists Vienna Secession, 2001.
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.

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“Speaking nearby” to the exhibition Trinh T. Minh-ha. Films., this research presentation showcases the Wattis Institute’s year-long research season on Trinh’s multifaceted practice as a filmmaker, writer and theorist. What does the promise of “speaking nearby” rather than “speaking about” look like today? What are the politics of hospitality? What are the problematics of “post-feminism,” and how do we challenge the West as the authoritative subject of feminist knowledge? Expanding the discursive orbit of these questions, the presentation features projects by artists Hồng-Ân Trương (US) and Genevieve Quick (US), and is accompanied by the online convening Mother Always Has a Mother, a result of the ongoing research collaboration between NTU CCA Singapore, Rockbund Art Museum (Shanghai), and the Wattis Institute.
Conceived by Kim Nguyen (Canada/United States), Curator and Head of Programs, CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts (Wattis), San Francisco.
Image: Genevieve Quick, Planet Celadon: Operation Completed, TRT 6:07, 2020, video still. Courtesy of the artist.

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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.

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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.

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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.

Online Film Programme:
Speaking / Thinking Nearby
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Trinh T. Minh-ha’s approach to film has addressed a wide field of discussions—reaching from the ethics of representation in ethnographic film, to aspects of migration, debates on global socio-political developments, and different layers of feminist discourse. Her films are investigations into the question of the voice as well as the relationship between the visible and audible. This programme will present a selection of films that echo some of these discussions negotiated by Trinh in her filmic works as well as her writings, and create a dialogue with other filmmakers and scholars.
Co-curated by Dr Marc Glöde, Assistant Professor, NTU ADM, and Dr Ella Raidel, Assistant Professor, NTU ADM and WKWSCI.
1 – 14 November 2020
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; 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.
Heidrun Holzfeind (Austria/Germany), an artist and filmmaker, explores the interrelations between history and identity, individual histories and political narratives of the present.
15 – 28 November 2020
Heaven’s Crossroad, Kimi Takesue, 2002
Video, colour, sound, 35 min
Rating: G
What does it mean to “look” cross-culturally? This film follows up on this question by creating a visual journey through Vietnam. Instead of following the established patterns of the classic documentary, Takesue creates an experimental experience that challenges the audience and invites us to reflect on what it means to “truly see another culture”. Within this beautiful visual travelogue, questions of desire, projection, and communication begin to appear, that are embedded in this idea of the cross-cultural encounter.
Kimi Takesue (United States) is an award-winning filmmaker and recipient of the Guggenheim and Rockefeller Fellowships in Film. www.kimitakesue.com
29 November – 10 December 2020
Naked Spaces—Living is Round, Trinh T. Minh-ha, 1985
16mm transferred to digital file, colour, sound, 135 min
Rating: PG13 (This film contains some nudity)
Six West African countries (Mauritania, Mali, Burkina Faso, Togo, Benin and Senegal) stand in the centre of this film. The work explores the life in the rural environments of these countries by taking a closer look at the everyday. With its nonlinear structure, the film steps away from the classical traditions of the documentary/ethnography tradition and offers a sensuous approach. It is a poetic journey to the African continent in which the interaction of the encountered people or the spaces in which they are living becomes relevant.
11 – 24 December 2020
A Song of Ceylon, Laleen Jayamanne, 1985
16mm film, colour, sound, 51 min
Rating: PG13 (This film contains mature content and some nudity)
This film is an intense study of the body, gender and the multiple aspects of colonialism. It addresses theatrical conventions by recreating classic film stills and presenting the body in striking tableaux. A remarkable film on which Trinh T Minh-Ha, in Discourse (1989), commented: “The anthropological text is performed both like a musical score and a theatrical ritual….The film engages the viewer in the cinematic body as spectacle…”.
Laleen Jayamanne (Sri Lanka/Australia) is a filmmaker and Professor of Cinema Studies at the Power Department of Fine Arts at the University of Sydney, Australia.
25 December 2020 – 5 January 2021
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.
6 – 19 January 2021
Nervous Translation, Shireen Seno, 2018
Colour, sound, 90 min
Rating: PG
This film follows the inner voice and play of an eight-year-old girl who cooks perfect miniature dishes, mimicking the world of adults. The perception of the child is translated through fragmentation and sounds that are written into words, such as the ring of the telephone, and the sound of the aircon, all forming together, an orchestra of the everyday. Waiting, boredom, and dead time pave the temporality of her imagination, while she is listening to cassette tapes recorded by her father, a migrant worker in Saudi Arabia. The personal phantasmagoric vision encounters the political dimension echoing the times of the People Power Revolution in the Philippines.
Shireen Seno (Japan/Philippines) studied architecture and cinema at the University of Toronto before relocating to Manila. Her work addresses memory, history and image-making, often in relation to the idea of home.
20 – 31 January 2021
Reassemblage, Trinh T. Minh-ha, 1982
16mm film transferred to digital, colour, sound, 40 min
Rating: PG13 (This film contains some nudity)
With her remarkable and widely discussed first film, Trinh brings the conventions of the documentary to our attention and asks how films in the field of documentary and ethnographic tradition have consecutively established a power to manipulate the way in which we perceive different cultures. By gathering filmic means and techniques that reject the traditional narrative forms, Trinh constantly alerts us to our own process of perception, furthermore reminding us that watching a movie is not a passive, but an active process.
1 – 14 February 2021
The Human Pyramid, Jean Rouch, 1961
DCP, colour, sound, 93 min
Rating: NC16 (This film contains mature content)
At the Lycée Français of Abidjan, Ivory Coast, Rouch worked with students there who willingly enacted a story about the arrival of a new white girl, Nadine, and her effect on the interactions of and interracial relationships between the white colonial French and Black African classmates, all non-actors. Fomenting a dramatic situation instead of repeating one, Rouch extended the experiments he had undertaken in Chronicle of a Summer, including having on-camera student participants view rushes of the film midway through the story. The docu-drama shows how working together to make the film changes their attitude towards each other.—Icarus Film
Jean Rouch (France), ethnographer-turned-filmmaker, was the father of modern cinéma vérité together with his collaborator, Edgar Morin. Their work has had great influence on French New Wave filmmakers.
15 – 28 February 2021
95 and 6 to Go, Kimi Takesue, 2016
Digital, colour, sound, 85 min
Rating: G
While visiting her grandfather, a recent widower in his 90s in Hawai’i, Takesue begins to follow his everyday routines. When he shows interest in his granddaughter’s stalled romantic screenplay, an interesting discussion about her work, family, memories, and identity unfolds. Shot over six years, this film shows how personal aspects intertwine with a critical reflection of the documentary genre.
Image: Trinh T. Minh-ha, Reassemblage, 1982, film still. Courtesy the artist.

24 Nov 2020, Tue 05:30 PM - 07:00 PM
8 Dec 2020, Tue 05:30 PM - 07:00 PM
22 Dec 2020, Tue 05:30 PM - 07:00 PM
2 Feb 2021, Tue 05:30 PM - 07:00 PM
16 Feb 2021, Tue 05:30 PM - 07:00 PM
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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.
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?
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.
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.

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Screening is over.
Heaven’s Crossroad, Kimi Takesue, 2002
Video, colour, sound, 35 min
Rating: G
What does it mean to “look” cross-culturally? This film follows up on this question by creating a visual journey through Vietnam. Instead of following the established patterns of the classic documentary, Takesue creates an experimental experience that challenges the audience and invites us to reflect on what it means to “truly see another culture”. Within this beautiful visual travelogue, questions of desire, projection, and communication begin to appear, that are embedded in this idea of the cross-cultural encounter.
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 Marc Glöde
Interview with filmmaker Kimi Takesue by Dr Ella Raidel. Courtesy Dr Ella Raidel.
BIOGRAPHY
Kimi Takesue (United States) is an award-winning filmmaker and recipient of the Guggenheim and Rockefeller Fellowships in Film. www.kimitakesue.com
Image: Heaven’s Crossroad, Kimi Takesue, 2002, film still. © Kimi Takesue.

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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.

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Screening is over.
Naked Spaces—Living is Round, Trinh T. Minh-ha, 1985
16mm transferred to digital file, colour, sound, 135 min
Rating: PG13 (This film contains some nudity)
Six West African countries (Mauritania, Mali, Burkina Faso, Togo, Benin and Senegal) stand in the centre of this film. The work explores the life in the rural environments of these countries by taking a closer look at the everyday. With its nonlinear structure, the film steps away from the classical traditions of the documentary/ethnography tradition and offers a sensuous approach. It is a poetic journey to the African continent in which the interaction of the encountered people or the spaces in which they are living becomes relevant.
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 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, Naked Spaces—Living is Round, 1985, film still. Courtesy the artist.

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Screening is over.
A Song of Ceylon, Laleen Jayamanne, 1985
16mm film, colour, sound, 51 min
Rating: PG13 (This film contains mature content and some nudity)
This film is an intense study of the body, gender and the multiple aspects of colonialism. It addresses theatrical conventions by recreating classic film stills and presenting the body in striking tableaux. A remarkable film on which Trinh T Minh-Ha, in Discourse (1989), commented: “The anthropological text is performed both like a musical score and a theatrical ritual….The film engages the viewer in the cinematic body as spectacle…”.
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
Laleen Jayamanne (Sri Lanka/Australia) is a filmmaker and Professor of Cinema Studies at the Power Department of Fine Arts at the University of Sydney, Australia.
Image: A Song of Ceylon, Laleen Jayamanne, 1985, film still. Courtesy of Women Make Movies.

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Recap of convening:
In “Grandma’s Story,” the last chapter of artist, filmmaker and theorist Trinh T. Minh-ha’s Woman, Native, Other (1989), she writes that, “The story depends upon every one of us to come into being. It needs us all, needs our remembering, understanding, and creating what we have heard together to keep on coming into being.”
Co-presented by NTU CCA Singapore, the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, and Rockbund Art Museum, this convening builds upon the idea of a multiplicity of storytellers and intergenerational, intercultural linkages in art, activism, stories, and histories. A two-part programme, the first segment involves a conversation between artists Hồng-Ân Trương and Ranu Mukherjee (both United States), reflecting on the Wattis’ year-long research season on the practice of Trinh T. Minh-ha. The conversation will close by screening video artworks by Ranu Mukherjee, 0rphan drift, and Genevieve Quick (United States), then the convening flows into a panel discussion with short presentations by Jungmin Choi (Korea), Eunsong Kim (United States), Green Zeng (Singapore) and Billy Tang (United Kingdom/China), exploring intergenerational dialogues, transnational and diasporic identities, and activism in creative practice and public life.
10.00 – 11.00am
In Conversation: Hồng-Ân Trương (United States) and Ranu Mukherjee (United States), moderated by Kim Nguyen (Canada/United States)
11.00 – 11.20am
Video Art Screenings: Home and the World (2015) and Dear Future (2020) by Ranu Mukherjee (United States), IF AI / AIBOHPORTSUALC (2020) by 0rphan drift (Ranu Mukherjee and Maggie Roberts), and Planet Celadon: Operation Completed (2020) by Genevieve Quick (United States)
11.30am – 1.00pm
Panel Discussion: The Welling Up and the Very Coursing of Water: On the Transnational, the Transgenerational, and the Diasporic
Moderators: Kim Nguyen and Dr Karin Oen (United States/Singapore)
Panelists: Jungmin Choi (Korea), Eunsong Kim (Korea/United States), and Green Zeng (Singapore)
Respondent: Billy Tang (United Kingdom/China)
BIOGRAPHIES
Hồng-Ân Trương (United States) is an artist and Associate Professor of Art at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Ranu Mukherjee (United States) is an artist and Associate Professor in Fine Art and Film at California College of the Arts, San Francisco.
Kim Nguyen (United States) is Curator and Head of Programmes at the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts.
Genevieve Quick (United States) is an artist and arts writer in San Francisco.
Karin Oen (Singapore/United States) is Deputy Director, Curatorial Programmes, NTU CCA Singapore.
Eunsong Kim (United States) is Assistant Professor in the Department of English, and an affiliate faculty of the department of Cultures, Societies and Global Studies at Northeastern University, Boston.
Jungmin Choi (Korea) is a campaigner and nonviolence trainer at World Without War, Seoul, an organisation that supports conscientious objectors. She also works at My Sister’s Place, an organisation that assists Korean and migrant women who live and work near US military bases in South Korea.
Green Zeng (Singapore) is an artist and filmmaker. He is currently Artist-in-Residence at NTU CCA Singapore.
Billy Tang (China/United Kingdom) is Senior Curator, Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai.
Image: Ranu Mukherjee, Dear Future, 2020, animation still. Courtesy the artist.

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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.

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Screening is over.
Nervous Translation, Shireen Seno, 2018
Colour, sound, 90 min
Rating: PG
This film follows the inner voice and play of an eight-year-old girl who cooks perfect miniature dishes, mimicking the world of adults. The perception of the child is translated through fragmentation and sounds that are written into words, such as the ring of the telephone, and the sound of the aircon, all forming together, an orchestra of the everyday. Waiting, boredom, and dead time pave the temporality of her imagination, while she is listening to cassette tapes recorded by her father, a migrant worker in Saudi Arabia. The personal phantasmagoric vision encounters the political dimension echoing the times of the People Power Revolution in the Philippines.
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 Shireen Seno.
BIOGRAPHY
Shireen Seno (Japan/Philippines) studied architecture and cinema at the University of Toronto before relocating to Manila. Her work addresses memory, history and image-making, often in relation to the idea of home.
Image: Nervous Translation, Shireen Seno, 2018, film still. Courtesy Reel Suspects.

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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, 70a 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.

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Screening is over.
Reassemblage, Trinh T. Minh-ha, 1982
16mm film transferred to digital, colour, sound, 40 min
Rating: PG13 (This film contains some nudity)
With her remarkable and widely discussed first film, Trinh brings the conventions of the documentary to our attention and asks how films in the field of documentary and ethnographic tradition have consecutively established a power to manipulate the way in which we perceive different cultures. By gathering filmic means and techniques that reject the traditional narrative forms, Trinh constantly alerts us to our own process of perception, furthermore reminding us that watching a movie is not a passive, but an active process.
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
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, Reassemblage, 1982, film still. Courtesy the artist.

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Screening is over.
The Human Pyramid, Jean Rouch, 1961
DCP, colour, sound, 93 min
Rating: NC16 (This film contains mature content)
At the Lycée Français of Abidjan, Ivory Coast, Rouch worked with students there who willingly enacted a story about the arrival of a new white girl, Nadine, and her effect on the interactions of and interracial relationships between the white colonial French and Black African classmates, all non-actors. Fomenting a dramatic situation instead of repeating one, Rouch extended the experiments he had undertaken in Chronicle of a Summer, including having on-camera student participants view rushes of the film midway through the story. The docu-drama shows how working together to make the film changes their attitude towards each other.—Icarus Film.
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
BIOGRAPHY
Jean Rouch (France), ethnographer-turned-filmmaker, was the father of modern cinéma vérité together with his collaborator, Edgar Morin. Their work has had great influence on French New Wave filmmakers.
Image: The Human Pyramid, Jean Rouch, 1961, film still. Courtesy Icarus Films.

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95 and 6 to Go, Kimi Takesue, 2016
Digital, colour, sound, 85 min
Rating: G
While visiting her grandfather, a recent widower in his 90s in Hawai’i, Takesue begins to follow his everyday routines. When he shows interest in his granddaughter’s stalled romantic screenplay, an interesting discussion about her work, family, memories, and identity unfolds. Shot over six years, this film shows how personal aspects intertwine with a critical reflection of the documentary genre.
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 Kimi Takesue by Dr Ella Raidel. Courtesy Dr Ella Raidel.
BIOGRAPHY
Kimi Takesue (United States) is an award-winning filmmaker and recipient of the Guggenheim and Rockefeller Fellowships in Film. www.kimitakesue.com
Image: 95 and 6 to Go, Kimi Takesue, 2016, film still. © Kimi Takesue.