Record, Retrieve, Reactivate

2018
Socially engaged art

(with Will Pham, Hau-Yu Tam, Cuong Pham, Hana Le, Ha Vu, Daikon, Sung Tieu at the An Viet Foundation, Photos couresy Carô Gervay, Hau-Yu Tam, Will Pham)

The exhibition focuses on a series of actions to revitalise the An Viet Foundation, a former Vietnamese refugee community centre in Hackney by inviting interventions to reactivate parts of the building using discussion, performance and curation.

The central work was a display of objects, banners and photographs from the An Viet Foundations archive curated by Will Pham and Cuong Pham. Objects in the archive are used as starting points with the materials reframed, enlarged and repositioned in the space to create a form of order and narrative.

Will Pham presented a 3 channel video installation, a study of damage and care, revealing cleaning and preparations of the space.

Sung Tieu performed ‘inferiority complex’, a spoken word text with audiences left in the dark with a disembodied voice covering topics including desire and sexuality.

Jalaikon and Ha Vu discussed magazines and print media for East and Southeast Asian Diasporas.

Community organiser Hau-Yu Tam facilitated a focus group based on her experiences of grassroots community activism such as her role in lobbying against the closure of the Westminster Chinese Library.