In three interrelated presentations (performance, screening, art talk), artist-scholars Việt Lê, kate-hers RHEE, and Hồng-Ân Trương examine archives, intimacies, and empires through cross-disciplinary practices which include experimental film, poetry, performance, and installation.

Việt Lê (San Francisco, Sài Gòn) presents selections from his art, academic, and curatorial projects. Filmed in Hà Nội, Los Angeles, Phnom Penh, and Bangkok, Lê will screen excerpts from three overlapping film projects that trace a transnational, time-traveling, trilingual trans-love triangle. lovebang! is an art music video for an original trilingual “hip pop” song in Vietnamese, Khmer, and English. “Hip pop” is a fictitious cross between pop and hip hop. eclipse is a video for spirited lovers, spirits, and the spiritual, filmed in Hà Nội in a ghostly guesthouse and Nhà sàn Đức—a traditional Vietnamese “house on stilts” and pioneering experimental artist-run space. The soundtrack is by controversial, legendary music pioneers Đại Lâm Linh. The heART/break! video project reimagines refugees—from 1970s Southeast Asia and today’s “European refugee crisis”—seeking shelter in a boy bar disco inferno. Upon the fortieth anniversary in 2015 of the military engagements in Southeast Asia, haunted lovers lost and found embody choreographies, cartographies of loss and desire.

Also criss-crossing continents, time, and place, kate-hers RHEE (Berlin, Seoul) will discuss the evolution of her politically engaged work as an artist and her dogged pursuit of cultivating creativity and playful improvisation in her artistic practice. She’ll share recent work and influences to frame the context of her current interdisciplinary project, Wunderkammer and Things, supported by the AHL Foundation. This work takes the form of a modern day cabinet of curiosities, which she describes as part sculptural installation, part mini museum and a reflection on her migratory history. The transcultural nature of Wunderkammer and Things draws on the artist’s Korean and German heritage and American cultural upbringing, spanning research in South Korea, Germany, and the United States, notably in New York where she’s been invited to examine object display and collection practices at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Through the lens of transnational feminism, RHEE’s work de-centers the legacy of the European patriarchal collection (and gaze), while focusing on alternative narratives.

Hồng-Ân Trương (US, Việt Nam) will screen and present selections from several projects that reflect a critical history of the camera and media in relationship to empire. Her work in video, photography, sound, and performance attempts to render the double – first, by simply making visible and legible certain histories, and secondly, by simultaneously trying to challenge a notion of whatever “pure” notion of the self that those histories can’t help but attempt to hold together. She’ll discuss recent projects including Treatment for A Year of the Rabbit, which uses a partially biographical account of her mother’s life in Việt Nam before fleeing as a refugee at the end of the American War in 1975 as the basis for a fictional film treatment using photographs, text, and video. She’ll also share some of her research and process for We Are Beside Ourselves, her current project supported by a Guggenheim Fellowship, which mines archives of what might seem to be the familiar history of the 1960s and 1970s radical liberation movements in relationship to Asian American political resistance. Engaging histories that span cultural and national borders, and making connections between both individual and collective narratives, Trương’s work interrogates conventions of looking, hearing, and speaking that are structured by tools inextricable from a history of violence.

Finally, RHEE and Lê will remix the text from the artbook White Gaze (Michelle Dizon and Lê) and as a performance, an audience call and response, tracing our collective desires and complicities.

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