Aesthetics of Potentiality: Nguyen Trinh Thi's Essay Films
- Submitting institution
-
The University of Westminster
- Unit of assessment
- 32 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
- Output identifier
- q1979
- Type
- C - Chapter in book
- DOI
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10.5040/9781350124295.ch-008
- Book title
- Women Artists, Feminism and the Moving Image
- Publisher
- Bloomsbury Academic
- ISBN
- 9781784537005
- Open access status
- Out of scope for open access requirements
- Month of publication
- August
- Year of publication
- 2019
- URL
-
-
- Supplementary information
-
-
- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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0
- Research group(s)
-
-
- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- Yes
- Additional information
- This chapter is one of the first English-language studies of the works of contemporary artist Nguyen Trinh Thi. It contributes to the emerging research fields of Southeast Asian contemporary art, and artists’ moving image. It is an outcome of Ingawanij’s research on the aesthetics of Southeast Asian artists’ moving image and experimental films, and the relationship between these modes and Southeast Asian curatorial forms. Her research leading to this publication was funded by a British Academy International Partnership and Mobility Scheme (2013-14), and a University of Westminster Strategic Research Fund (2015-16). The research method combines analysis of form and contextualisation with curatorial work. Ingawanij’s insights on Nguyen’s works emerged from curating film screening programmes and exhibitions with the artist’s films, and collaborating with her on curatorial activities.
The chapter’s proposition concerning the essayistic form of Nguyen’s films extends the research scope of essay films, which tends to remain restricted to analyses of European and North American examples. It suggests the usefulness of the concept of the essay film for engaging with Southeast Asian artists’ moving image. Ingawanij’s theorisation of the enunciative and gestural mode of Nguyen’s films proposes a framework for interpreting how Southeast Asian contemporary artists are creating historiographic and temporal forms. The chapter highlights the importance of contextualising Nguyen’s works in relation to the historical paradigm of the subjectivity of the modern artist in Vietnam. The chapter complicates theoretical understanding of the epistolary essay film, shifting from the model of first-person enunciation to the artist as social agent within a historically contingent paradigm of the collective responsibility of the artist.
Shortly after its publication in this edited volume on women artists and feminism, Ingawanij’s chapter was requested for republication in the State of Motion: Rushes of Time catalogue (2020, Asian Film Archive), for an exhibition featuring Nguyen’s films.
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -
