Symposium #3: “Authorship” in curating

Vườn lài: Borrowing, playing, and other practices of “promis(e)cuity” in the project exploring the heritage of queer cinema
Nguyễn Quốc Thành 

Behind the thick and heavy curtain, an action movie has already begun. High-level sounds mingle with murmuring voices and laughter. Some audience members are standing, others sitting or moving about in groups or on their own, crisscrossing through the rows of seats. In that dimly lit auditorium, two parallel times coexist – both a series of anxieties, anticipations, and transformations. The time of thrilling events unfolding on the big screen created for the audience, and the time the audience makes for themselves. When borrowing the name “Vườn Lài” for the project exploring the heritage of queer cinema, I think about “queering” of this now gone movie theater frequented by gay men in Saigon, who are largely considered working class. Shifting the gaze from the screen to adjacent seats, replacing visual experience with bodily experience, transforming a public area into an intimate space – aesthetic gestures in a space created specifically for certain senses and behaviours. The landscape of Vườn Lài also reminds me of movie theaters where gay men cruising for sex partners in famous movies, a heritage of queer culture and queer cinema, the activities occurring not in just one place, one city and country. Looking at it this way, perhaps the making of space and time that does not conform to what has been predetermined, the remaking sense of space and time, the “re-authoring” can always take place? Is it not only the ability of the audience who are the authors of their own experiences, but also cinema’s inherent quality? In this paper, I will explore the curatorial practices in Vườn Lài-Wonderland (2019) that are related  to the above-proposed idea of “re-authoring”.

On individual sensibilities in exhibition-making
Nguyễn Huy An 

Before becoming a curator, one must first be an audience. An audience’s sensibility is personal and subjective: it empathizes, discovers, and amplifies the vitality of the artwork; it depends on the life experiences and disposition of the audience. A work coming into existence marks the temporal completion of the artist’s part. With curation, whether the artist desires it or not, the artwork will still be presented under the influence of various external factors among which is the curator’s own sensibility. Based on the curator’s sensibility — a context in which the presentation of the artwork can take on various approaches, which we may refer to as display techniques. These include: presenting the work as it is, selecting the placement of the artwork, and planning spatial composition. Sometimes, the intervention of these techniques holds equal weight whether the method seems democratic or dictatorial.

While working as a curator, I am not concerned with other curatorial tasks but only with the materialization of the exhibition. In this paper, I will refer to the two projects that I curated, including Skylines with Flying People 4 (2020) at KingKho-Mini Storage, a self-storage rental business in Hà Đông district (Hanoi) and A Story of Dreams exhibition (2023) by Phạm Xuân Cảnh to elucidate the above points.

White Noise: A proposal on seeing
Vân Đỗ

In the practice of curating contemporary art exhibitions, which may seem predetermined and can be packaged into formulas, there still exist many loopholes for creative strategies. Within the various components of this practice –  selecting artworks and methods of working with artists, arranging and manipulating space, crafting various forms of text, and handling social situations associated with locally specific human and non-human factors – curators are faced with countless possibilities to propose alternative approaches that deviate from the established conventions. 

Though they might appear evidently or not, all these components are formed based on the perspective, experience, and physical condition of the curator. When they are evident, the curator may face the risk of being criticized as “too personal” or “interfering with the work”, or more neutrally, as “having authorship”. 

In White Noise (Nguyễn Art Foundation, 2023), these components shift, dislocate, juggle, discontent, digress from the starting point, and arrive at the finish line in an unexpected way. By revisiting the aforementioned exhibition, this paper aims to make a proposal on seeing.