“The role of the artist is exactly the same as that of the lover. If someone loves another person, they must make them aware of those things that they do not see.” Tuan Andrew Nguyen (Ho Chi Minh City, former Saigon, 1976) endorses the reflection by the African-American writer James Baldwin to explain a work that largely revolves around memory and how it can help us deal with trauma. At the Fundació Miró, home of his first major exhibition in Spain, Nguyen introduces us to his world. subtle and radical through three sculptures inspired by Calder, an artist who stood against the Vietnam War. But unlike Calder’s, his are built from fragments of bombs and projectiles used during the war. deadly, which if they had detonated could have ended the lives of thousands of people, to which the artist, as if recognizing the compassion of the bomb by not exploding, gives it new life by tuning the pieces so that when struck they emit sound frequencies with healing properties.
It is the beginning of Our ghosts live the future, the exhibition corresponding to the latest Joan Miró award, and from inside the rooms comes the lament of a bomb that did not explode and that is being buried inside a pit for a safe detonation: “ The naval officer who was in charge of loading me did not activate the contact fuse. For years he cursed his name. He cursed his inadequacy, his incompetence. For leaving me a shadow of myself. For letting me be here for almost 50 years.” Nguyen follows with his camera the almost ceremonial burial of the failed artifact and juxtaposes it with an old American propaganda film about the precision and power of its military technology (The unburied sounds of an imperfect horizon).
Born in Ho Chi Minh City, the artist and filmmaker emigrated with his family to the United States when he was a child and returned to Vietnam, where he currently works, after graduating in Fine Arts from the University of California. He was part of the Boat People, the wave of refugees who fled by sea after the war. The trauma of displacement still affects him. “Although this is an occasion to celebrate, I cannot sit here in front of you without expressing my sadness, my pain, my concern for all the wars that are happening now. “It would be disingenuous of me not to share with you how my heart breaks every day to see all the civilians and all the children who are suffering or have lost their lives in the violent genocide that is occurring in Gaza.”
Our ghosts live the future, curated by Martina Millà, explores the traumas inherited from war. “Telling stories, sharing them with others, is the tool that can help us heal and move forward,” she says. In The Becoming of the Specter of Ancestors, a multi-screen video installation, they are the families of Senegalese soldiers who went to fight alongside the French in Vietnam, while in Because None of the Living Will Listen, the daughter of a Moroccan soldier and Vietnamese mother He writes a letter to the father he never met.
