The Other Side of Now is a new solo exhibition of film and sculpture by Vietnamese American artist Tuấn Andrew Nguyễn running at Zeitz MOCAA. The works on show explore the transnational entanglements created by colonisation and war in Vietnamese, Senegalese, and Moroccan history to propose a space for communal healing and remembrance. The Other Side of Now opens on 22 August 2024 and runs until 20 July 2025.
More about artist, Tuấn Andrew Nguyễn
Tuấn Andrew Nguyễn was born in 1976 in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. Shortly after, he and his family migrated to the United States where he lived and eventually graduated from the Fine Arts programme at the University of California, Irvine, in 1999 and received his Master of Fine Arts from The California Institute of the Arts in 2004.
Nguyễn’s films move along spectrums of fact and fiction, past and present, memory and forgetting. He uses the power of storytelling to create speculative visions of painful histories.
The artist opens a doorway for empathy and healing for both the subject and the viewer. In letters to a lost family member imagined conversations between generations, or reincarnation as a means of healing from physical trauma, his work looks at hard pasts to realise healed futures.
The Other Side of Now
This art exhibition in Cape Town presents three film works that explore a deep engagement with migration narratives stories and charting diasporic experiences in Asia, Africa and beyond. The works are titled Because No One Living Will Listen / Người Sống Chẳng Ai Nghe (2023), The Specter of Ancestors Becoming (2019), and The Unburied Sounds of a Troubled Horizon (2022).
All three films are connected by the period from 1954 to 1972; between the end of the First Indochina War and the conclusion of the American War in Vietnam. One chapter considers Moroccan soldiers who defected from the colonial army only for their return home to be hindered by the outbreak of the American War. Another tells the story of Senegalese-Vietnamese children and their disrupted connections to family and origin.
Nguyễn creates sculptural objects that materialise his cinematic worlds, placing viewers face to face with relics that carry the weight of generations. These include tangible remnants of war in the five Singing Bowls (2022), constructed from leftover brass artillery shells; delicately embroidered tapestries of Việt Minh propaganda leaflets in Letters From the Other Side (2024); and intimate family photographs in Solidarities Between the Reincarnated (2019).
The Other Side of Now highlights the shifts in and between time that are ever present within the
artist’s work. What is the other side of ‘now’? Is it ‘then’? And when was ‘then’? And what
waits to be revealed when we arrive on the other side?
Through narration, Nguyễn’s work probes history to bring to light lost stories that are intertwined with an unclear reality. These might be the same inherited stories that have been told over and over, but in time, there comes a longing to know more, a need to address the questions that were never asked and
in turn, never answered. Is it possible to get to the other side and find a different ending?
How to book tickets to Zeitz MOCAA
Cost: From R250pp, book via Webtickets or pay at entrance
When: Running from 22 August 2024 to 20 July 2025. Daily from 10am to 6pm
Where: V&A Waterfront Silo District, S Arm Rd, V&A Waterfront, Cape Town
Website: zeitzmocaa.museum
Email: [email protected]
Tel: 087 350 4777
Instagram: @zeitzmocaa
Facebook: @ZeitzMOCAA
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