THU VAN TRAN

Thu Van Tran’s work consists in a form of writing where words and meanings are considered as signs that can only be activated by an encounter of materials. The title of the exhibition, Traînée de poussière (Trail Dust)¹ intersects evanescence and collective memory, beauty and destruction.

For this project, the artist has developed a sculptural language which takes the form of petrifaction, the process by which organic matter transforms into mineral matter. It allows us to grasp both the immediacy of passing from life to death, while placing body and meaning in a mineral and undefined, infinite time. Thus, her leaves, clouds, turtles, blank pages, grey trickles-an ecosystem of signs expressing harmony and discord-will run adrift in the gallery like so many allegories of life and decline.

Then will follow allegories of touch, sight, and speech. The latter, materialised in rubber-vegetable offering or commodity of the colonial age, depending on your point of view-leads us into the metaphysical dimension.

For the artist, mingling an obsession with the past and the present serves to instil the aesthetic experience with a degree of historical awareness that is all too often buried or repressed. Aporias given to melancholy² which the artist is trying to untangle.

1 Operation Trail Dust was the codename for the Agent Orange spraying programme conducted by the US Army in Vietnam during the 1960s.

2 Alicia Knock describing Thu Van Tran’s work