Tam Khoa Vuthe hybrid condition
Tam Khoa Vu, 4_tkv_eyes (détail), 2023.
Production and Presentation Short-term Residency in partnership with Festival Accès Asie
Public Presentation on Saturday, May 13, 2023, from 2 pm to 5 pm.
the hybrid condition explores cultural hybridity through a four-channel video and audio installation using a blend of personal, archival, and modern-day footage. By juxtaposing various moving images, the video installation highlights the complex interconnectedness of diasporic culture and cultural colonialism.
Through footage emphasizing Vietnamese identity and diaspora, the hybrid condition digs into the roots of cultural, ethnic, and national identities to put into question Western hegemony and influence over Vietnam, Vietnamese, and Vietnamese-Canadian identity.
The installation makes use of the Pepper’s Ghost illusion technique to layer video and meaning. Two screens are placed in front of each other projecting two video works, looping on different run times to create a generative video work. The unplanned nature of the work will mix and collage the selected videos, presenting them occasionally at odds with each other, yet more often than not coexisting. The happenstance nature of the videos colliding mimics a familiar diasporic experience. Each screen contains its own visually complex and multivalent video with its own meaning and ideas, but viewed together the screens make up a more nuanced and composite identity.
A sound-designed audio track shifting from ambient sounds to trance rhythms, coupled with a voiced descriptive caption, help guide viewers through the visual chaos. Cues from the audio help stabilize and destabilize viewers by making evident the contradicting, absurd, or uplifting moments that can often be found hiding plain sight.
Tam Khoa Vu, 4_tkv_eyes (détail), 2023.
Tam Khoa Vu is an artist based in Tio’Tia:Ke / Montreal. His work challenges common representations and depictions of Vietnamese and Vietnamese-Canadian identity, while playfully opening up spaces of abundance, possibility, and nuance. Using various visual and digital art forms, his practice explores themes of production, manufacturing, power, representation, and identity through exploring the nuances of the “third space” of diasporic experience between Vietnam and Canada.
Notable presentations of the artist’s works include Montréal Arts Interculturels (MAI), Montreal, QC (2022); ARTCH Emerging Artists Exhibition, Montreal, QC (2021), Eastern Bloc, Montreal, QC (2016). He has received grants from large and small scale funding bodies and institutions such as OBORO (2022), Canada Council for the Arts (2022), Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec (2022, 2021), and MAI (2022). In 2017, he completed his B.F.A at Concordia University in Design and Computation Arts.
