Adaptation Fever (2006-2007)
multi-channel video installation
black & white with sound
digital video
Total running time: 20 minutes
PART 1: The Past is a Distant Colony (9:00)
PART 2: A Story in the Process of Self-Alienation (5:00)
PART 3: It’s True Because It’s Absurd (3:00)
PART 4: Explosions in the Sky (3:00)
This trilogy of discrete video works approaches the archive through appropriation and disruption. Using found footage of Viet Nam during its French Indochina period, this project explores questions about the politics of representation and the construction of difference in relation to history, time, and memory. The split screen and juxtaposition become a simple technique whereby the “real” and by extension, its historical referent, are permanently deferred objects, further diminished through the overdubbed narratives in Vietnamese and French which are only briefly summarized in English subtitles. Playing with the idea that nostalgia can be evoked without memory or experience, and also by the co-dependent relationship between the West’s present and the Other’s desire for that present, this video appropriates archival images as a way to consider translation, postcolonial subjectivity, and sentimentality.
Explosions in the Sky (Dien Bien Phu 1954) from Hong-An Truong on Vimeo.
The Past is a Distant Colony, video still
The Past is a Distant Colony, video still
The Past is a Distant Colony, video still
Explosions in the Sky, video still
Explosions in the Sky, video still