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EVENT DESCRIPTION
Para Site is pleased to present ‘Cloud Chamber’, the first institutional exhibition to survey the activities of Art Labor, a Ho Chi Minh City-based collective formed by Thao Nguyen Phan, Truong Cong Tung and Arlette Quynh-Anh Tran.
The exhibition ‘Cloud Chamber’ presents Art Labor’s long-term historical research, poetic observations, and decade-long practice of relationship-building with the Jrai community in the Central Highlands of Vietnam. Alongside Art Labor’s newly commissioned and existing works, the exhibition features artwork from Jrai artists, with whom the collective have created collaborative projects since 2016, archival material from a missionary-turned-anthropologist in the French colonial period, and works by contemporary artists inspired by the region.
Within an exhibition setting, a constellation of artworks and happenings explores collisions between science and mythology, human and non-human—to open up spaces for new forces of change to emerge. Jrai wood-carved sculptures and musical instruments are presented alongside moving image, installation, drawings and archival photographs that together weave a counter-narrative to prevalent representations, past and present, of the Central Highlands.
