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What My Eyes Behold is Simultaneous
by Thuy-Han Nguyen-Chi
Germany, United Kingdom 2019, 23′
Original Format: Installation: two channel video; ping-pong table, balls and rackets; mirrors. Courtesy the artist
Presented at Lo schermo dell’arte 2021 in occasion of the exhibition Thinking Beyond – Moving Images for a Post-Pandemic World
The film is part of VISIO – European Programme on Artists’ Moving Images – 10th edition
In this two-channel video installation, a father and daughter explore their relationship by
contemplating the aerodynamics of flying objects and recounting fragmented microhistories of the Cold War period in Germany—birthplace of the daughter—and Vietnam—birthplace of the father. The ping-pong table references the so-called “Ping-Pong Diplomacy” which in 1971 had a key role in opening the long-frozen relations between the US and China, while simultaneously serving as imagery for the loops of influence between people on small and vast scales, across space and time. Infused with magical realism, Nguyen-Chi’s work explores the entanglements between personal and collective histories and the way they are shaped by politics, memory, and cinema.
Thuy-Han Nguyen-Chi (1988, Germany. Lives and works between Berlin and London). Her practice mutates in and out of sculpture, installation, moving image, and interdisciplinary research. Her works explore imaginations of freedom at the intersection of film-making and film theory, critical refugee studies and postcolonial studies, personal/prosthetic memory and individual/collective histories. Nguyen-Chi studied Fine Arts at StaĚdelschule and Film at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is currently pursuing PhD research in Film at the University of Westminster. She has exhibited her work at Art Hub Copenhagen; Atletika, Vilnius; Centro di Musica Contemporanea di Milano; Haus, Vienna; Kunstverein NuĚrnberg, NuĚrnberg; Museum fuĚr Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt; Nottingham Contemporary, Nottingham; SaĚ€n Art, Saigon; Site Galleries, Chicago; Whitechapel Gallery, London.