Sonic Infidelities: Performing Time, Space, and Nonalignment in Huong Ngo’s In the Shadow of the Future
GLAS Lecture Series: Justin Quang Nguyen Phan
March 5, 2021
11:00 AM - 12:30 PM
In this talk, Justin Quang Nguyen Phan critically analyzes Chicago-based artist Hu'o'ng Ngo's multimedia art installation, In the Shadow of the Future (2019). Rather than interpret Ngo's depiction of the Vietnamese diaspora through a polarized binary of communist or anticommunist alignments, Phan contextualizes how In the Shadow of the Future's non-aligned sensibilities unsettle Vietnamese state and diasporic histories that intimately connect Vietnam, France, and the U.S.
With critical attention to the global entanglements of refugeehood, war, empire, and Asian America, Phan emphasizes how Ngo's art installation enacts a diasporic method of cnt1que through sonic performances of in/fidelity. As such, Phan explores the methodological urgency of works that refuse, fragment, and incinerate the spatial and temporal binds of Cold War epistemologies as a means of generating new possibilities for nonalignment.
Date posted
Feb 28, 2021
Date updated
Sep 7, 2022