Join us for the opening of Perforation, Ellipse by artist and filmmaker Alison Nguyen. This exhibition drifts between narrative passages in her new film Aisle 9, sensorial abstractions, a performance on 16mm film, and archival footage of once-banned Vietnamese bolero music. Following the American War in Vietnam, the Vietnamese government banned bolero music for its sentimentality and romantic lyricism, however, the genre has recently reentered mainstream circulation. It endured underground in Vietnam because it was condemned, forced to exist quietly in households; and in the United States and abroad, disseminated through diasporic tapes, and transnational cabarets such as the television show Paris by Night. In the U.S. today, different but parallel constraints are performed, shaping what may be seen, shown, or archived. Perforation, Ellipse stages censorship as a paradoxical system that can reproduce the very meanings it seeks to suppress, opposing a binary of freedom and repression.
Learn more about the exhibition here.
