The C3A presents an audiovisual retrospective with four video-installations that speak about contemporary history, narratives, and memory, by the artist Dinh Q. Lê (Hà Tiên, Vietnam, 1968). Regarded as the most influential artist of his generation in Vietnam, he has had solo shows at the Mori Museum of Art (Tokyo) and MoMA (New York). The public will be able to see such works as The Farmers and the Helicopters (2006), the artist's incursion into the documentary genre to evoke the war. This work is linked to South China Sea Pishkun (2009), also included in the show, which employs animation to construct an image in which the line of the horizon becomes thronged with military helicopters which plunge incessantly and continuously into the sea, in a metaphor for the past and the repetition of history. One of the key themes of his work is this observation of history from diverse perspectives, ranging from the candor of the peasants who tell their horror stories with touching ingenuousness, to a reflection on the digital universe that leads us to the reduction of history to a pixelated image, in which we view history as a minimalised stage set.

Photo credit: Dinh Q, Lê. South China Sea Pishkun. 

Photo Album on Flickr.