-----

In this talk, scholar and artist Ly Thuy Nguyen shares about the process behind the creation of their newest installation called Motherlands, currently exhibited in XIA gallery in St. Paul, Minnesota. MOTHERLANDS shows an impressionistic pocket of homeland condensed in the overlay of rarely-visited dark rooms in the artist’s memories & extrapolations: altar rooms, elderly women’s living quarters, a spare room with no window in an ancestral house in Nghe An, single beds occupied by city dwellers, all leading to a courtyard with a multi-purpose water basin that holds and washes living and dead things--a prevalent item in most Vietnamese households that would soon be replaced by indoor kitchen sinks and bathtubs in the shrinking spaces of the expanding cities.

Threaded through the illegible feminine matters of fallen hair and jagged nails, this installation attempts at materializing a relationship across four generations of exilic women who were daughters of daughters who left their land of birth. The pieces contemplate the growing life forces that evidence both vitality and agedness, which remain constant across space and time but become monstrous without attachment to the racialized feminine body. Imbued in these pieces is a queer longing for a maternal lineage that resists disposability, remembers queerly, and exerts bodily autonomy – especially against repressive cultures and state effacement.

-----