In With love from your Vietnamese sisters, Hồng-Ân Trương expands upon a body of work that engages deeply with archival materials, examining structures of time, memory, and the production and circulation of narrative histories. Her presentation in the Johnson-Kulukundis Family Gallery responds to an object held at Radcliffe’s Schlesinger Library: a scrapbook created and gifted to Angela Davis in 1972 by the Vietnam Committee for Solidarity with the American People. Trương uses this album—which contains Vietnamese articles following Davis’s prosecution and trial in the early 1970s, preserved and presented with hand-lettered annotations and messages of support and admiration—as an entry point to consider the unrealized potential of international solidarities and the ethics of memory. Photographed pages from the album are printed as carbon transfer photographs on mirror and suggest the nearness of history as well as the proliferation of knowledge through acts of remembering. Shown alongside other photographic work and a new, three-part single channel film, Trương’s engagement with materials drawn from both archival and personal collections reflects on the intimate ties and political threads that bind us across generations.
Hồng-Ân Trương: With love from your Vietnamese sisters is organized by Caitlin Julia Rubin, a visiting curator at Harvard Radcliffe Institute.
Harvard Radcliffe Institute gratefully acknowledges the Johnson-Kulukundis Family Endowment Fund for the Arts, which is supporting this exhibition.When viewing Trương’s exhibition, we encourage guests also to visit the concurrent exhibition in Radcliffe’s Lia and William Poorvu Gallery, Illuminate: Contextualizing Asian American Women’s Stories through the Archives.
Artist
Using photography, sound, video, and performance, Hồng-An Trương (b. 1976) draws connections between narratives typically presented as disparate, underscoring the gaps and silences in conventionally told and remembered histories. Her artworks knit together diverse perspectives and moments, casting new light on the past while reflecting and exploring our current political climate.
Her work has been shown at venues such as the International Center for Photography and MoMA in New York City; the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University; the Phillips Collection in Washington D.C.; the Minneapolis Institute of Art; and the Irish Museum of Modern Art. In 2017, her work was included in the New Orleans triennial Prospect.4: The Lotus in Spite of the Swamp. She has been awarded an Art Matters Foundation Grant, a Foundation for Contemporary Arts emergency grant, and a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship. Trương is based in Durham, North Carolina, where she is a professor of art at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Visit
Free and open to the public.
See available curator-led exhibition tour dates.
