A Work Always In-Progress
Gia Ngân 家银, Installation
scroll slowly and cautiously
[part 1]
[poems, letters of confrontation / admiration, videos of us* dancing / hugging / celebrating, webcam recordings of us crying, social media posts, a carousal of books on love, a deck of cards on intimate questions that we* created, a picture snatched from a magazine on embracing sufferings drawn by a child, sticky notes with questions that come from our* sufferings as we* navigate our artivism, the draft of a small book called (De)colonized Love that’s still in creation by Gia Ngân, a notebook with a checklist on colonial mentality, a bracelet that was bought on the full-moon from a pagoda that resides on the tallest mountain in Da Nang Vietnam, ...]
The list of things that will be on this wall grows in size as time passes. The artist continues to work on the project as audience comes in and out. She may occassional ask the audience for help with a nail or hammer, and the audience become participants, start leaving their personal belongings like hairband or sticky notes onto the wall. That is, if their emotionality commands them to do so.
There is a station where people can contribute to our collective spreadsheet on love. But they who stand in front of the laptop to make new entries will be broadcasted alongside other artifacts. However, the laptop crashed. Which is part of the deal with an incomplete project: No one can expect perfection.
Installations are usually the antithesis of a real and humanistic archive. It takes away collective participation and the organic, continual growth of an archive of actual memories. Archives in galleries appoint a few people power; The power of representing, of story-telling, and of erasing the paradoxes that do not fit.
watch the below experience in continuation and with sound here ︎︎︎
The videos above are all shot by cameras. They are the stuff that we would
comfortably post online;
Much like the gallery archives, clean and curated strategically.