A short review on The Ocean In A Drop: solo exhibition of Trinh T. Minh-Ha
The migration of objects and ideas is constantly reshaping our perspectives about “culture”. Although the traditional notions of ethnic authenticity and purity have never deceased, there have been reassessments on the fundamental process of culture regarding its fluidity and hybridity due to the rising age of global mobility. Hence, culture is no longer seen as a result but rather a thread of processes. And the heart of this matter lies in the surprise of movement, the sense of not quite knowing where the journey will end or even where it began. To deal with this sense of unhomeliness, cultural mobility studies ponder the mechanism through structural struggles and ask what agencies are involved.
The solo exhibition of Trinh T. Min-ha showing last year in the Württembergischer Kunstverein Stuttgart is a typical example of a mobility study on culture and resonates with Greenblatt’s manifesto of ‘Cultural Mobilities’. The exhibition mainly consists of six lengthy films directed by the artist Trinh T. Min-ha. The films are played simultaneously in separate berths. The sounds and images reveal how Min-ha reacted to the contact zones of cultural exchanges and the sensation of rootedness, which implies the personal background of Min-ha, who originated from Vietnam and emigrated to the USA during the Vietnamese war. She is known for films, music compositions, and literary works, depicting her transcultural life experiences, in which the artist tried to “speak nearby” with intimacy and respect when approaching foreignness and the otherness.
Among those six prominent films, chosen from Minh-ha’s poetic oeuvre from the 1980s to today, What about China? is the most recent work, premiered in 2021. The film surrounds the perceived harmonized culture in China, in the sense of being in balance with society, with nature, and with oneself. Through images, ambient sounds, monologues from different persons, and the singers’ voices, Minh-ha is trying to respond to the calling of China in herself. How has the history and culture of China called upon her Vietnamese roots? What has China caught in the world’s eyes? When and which China do we tend to talk about? These are different threads that weave together into the non-linear narrations of the film.
Another artwork from the exhibition is Surname Viet, Given name Nam, which was shot in the year of 1989. In contrast to What about China, Surname Viet, Given name Nam has a rather obvious narration path. The plot of the film was connected by interviews with Vietnamese women. Unlike the previous film, the figures featured in this film have chances to speak in front of the camera. Their interviews were selected by another book written by Mai Thu Van. Minh-ha chose four of the interviews in the book and reenacted them by other women. In other words, the artist critically reflects on the ethnographic interview format and documentary selection processes, and at the same time examines the methods and politics of translation.
Trinh T. Minh-ha was born in 1952 in Hanoi and raised in Saigon. Her childhood and adolescence were spent during the Vietnam War. It was not until 1970, that Minh-ha emigrated to the United States. As for her artist career, Minh-ha accomplished her bachelor’s degree in music composition in Vietnam and carried on her postgraduate studies in ethnomusicology and French literature in Illinois and Paris. The displacing trajectory and interdisciplinary backgrounds have nurtured her sensitivity in voicing the multivocality. To view the fluidity and uncertainty of lives, the concept of “void” is an integral role in Minh-ha’s artworks. The void is the idea of in-between, which enables the artist to retain multi-possibilities in framing stories. In return, her works are never fully done but have existed as organic lives that are open for interpretation and could be apprehended and disseminated in varied ways.
"The Story never really begins or ends, even though there is a beginning and an end to every story, just as there is a beginning and an end to every teller." —Trinh T. Minh-ha (1989, p. 1)
Minh-ha’s films provide voids with obscurity and multivocality. She indicates the world where truths are voiced with different perspectives. Truths are dynamic and collective. We acquire truths to understand relationships and otherness. People are always searching for meanings, values, and truth to understand otherness, also in an effort to recognize themselves. However, once we specify the definition of truth, we incorporate some parts and repudiate the rest. In other words, it is a process of selection; hence, we can never reach a fully completed definition. According to Minh-ha, truth can only be approached indirectly, working with the possibility by seeking intimacy. This could be the essential reason for creating voids, as in a way to feel, to understand, and to describe otherness from her perspectives of life on the move.
Resources:
Chen, Nancy N. 1992. “‘Speaking Nearby:’ a Conversation with Trinh T. Minh-Ha.” Visual Anthropology Review 8 (1): 82–91. https://doi.org/10.1525/var.1992.8.1.82.
Davies, Carole Boyce. Hypatia 6, no. 2 (1991): 220–22. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3810109.
Kunstnernes Hus. 2023. “Trinh T. Minh-Ha in Conversation with Mike Sperlinger.” www.youtube.com. January 18, 2023. https://youtu.be/Ax5_s_2O_kU.
Greenblatt, Stephen. "Cultural Mobility: an Introduction". Cultural Mobility: a Manifesto. Pp.18. 2009.
Minh-Ha, Trinh T. 1990. “Documentary Is/Not a Name.” October 52: 76. https://doi.org/10.2307/778886.
NTU CCA Singapore. 2020. “In Conversation: Trinh T. Minh-Ha and Ute Meta Bauer.” Vimeo. https://vimeo.com/473354373.
Parmar, Pratibha, and Trinh T. Minh-ha. 1990. “Woman, Native, Other.” Feminist Review, no. 36: 65. https://doi.org/10.2307/1395110.
Posch, Doris. 2017. “Speaking Nearby – Postcolonial Film in Theory and Practice.” Mdw-Magazin. March 1, 2017. https://www.mdw.ac.at/magazin/index.php/2017/03/01/speaking-nearby-postkolonialer-film-in-theorie-und-praxis/?lang=en.
SWR2. 2022. “Poesie Und Medienkritik – Das Vielschichte Werk von T. Minh-Ha in Stuttgart.” Swr.online. October 25, 2022. https://www.swr.de/swr2/kunst-und-ausstellung/poesie-und-medienkritik-das-vielschichte-werk-von-trinh-t-minh-ha-im-wkv-stuttgart-100.html. Trinh T. Min-ha. The Ocean in A Drop. Wüttermbergishcer Kunstverein Stuttgart. https://www.wkv-stuttgart.de/en/program/2022/exhibitions/trinh-t-minh-ha/ 16.12.2022.