AN-MY LÊ

The exhibition follows on two important solo museum exhibitions in the United States including her recent 2023 career retrospective, Between Two Rivers/Giữa hai giòng sông/Entre deux rivières at MoMA, and the exhibition On Contested Terrain, at the Carnegie Museum, 2020-2021, which traveled to the Milwaukee Museum and the Amon Carter Museum.

In this exhibition, An-My Lê presents two new series of recent photographs, Dark Star and Grey Wolf, continuing her exploration of the contradictory nature of the manifest and the sublime within the contemporary American landscape, and the latter as a present-day locus of technology, power and ambition. In Lê’s work, scale is both temporal and historical, encompassing themes of displacement, war, memory, and resilience. These are present in her earliest black and white pictures of Vietnam (1994-1998) in which she returned to a scarred homeland as a political refugee, to her pictures of war re-enactors in the southern U.S. (Small Wars, 1999-2002), to staged military training exercises in the American desert (29 Palms, 2003-04), to her more recent lens on polarisation in the United States through a series of historical fragments (Silent General, 2015 to today). With extraordinary consideration of history and culture, Lê’s view onto her subjects often incorporates an elevated perspective to achieve its signature precision and ethical neutrality. In zooming out to look closer, her stepped back ‘proscenium framing’ brings into crystal clear vision her observations and stories not unlike layers of a history painting.

This strategy expands in the current exhibition in which two new series of photographs, both cinematic in their depiction of the constructs of war, explore a new geopolitical gravity, and what Lê defines as the nexus between photography and the post-atomic world. Establishing a thin line between reality and fiction, what is visible and unknown, each begins from reverse points of view: Dark Star, presents starscapes taken in Mesa Verde, and Grey Wolf, aerial views in Montana. While embarking on the latter, Lê discovered her interest in documenting the stars, as well as the evolution of a contemporary and paranoid sublime.

In Grey Wolf, Lê’s eye is trained on the farmlands and mountains in Montana from an aerial perspective. Presented here as a series of seven photographs in a cyclorama — a circular arc with 360-degree views often used to represent the sky —this once-idealised panoramic device gives mythic sculptural form to Lê’s images of vast terrains of seemingly everyday rural American life, from backyards and farm fields to mountains which surround it. Depicted are areas housing furtive nuclear missile silos surrounding an air force base and missile launch control centres, woven into the quotidian backdrop of the American West. A plain spoken and austere meditation on the fragility of life, these pictures point to hidden catastrophic dangers that lurk beneath, and to our collective unease. An uncanny, insidious reminder of nuclear threat, they conjure an eerie presence that is both fictive premonition and fact.The Dark Star series was taken in Mesa Verde National Park, in Colorado, a landscape dominated by cliff dwellings and mesas of the Ancestral Pueblo people who built thriving communities in the 13^th century. The photographs, created close to the time of the New Moon on the last cycle of the year when the Milky Way is still visible in the Northern Hemisphere, capture the night skies from ground up. They summon wonders of the unknown, and ancient lands in which cosmology and astronomical observations once guided rituals and beliefs, or enlightened sacred sites and ceremonial chambers. Informing a once agrarian society, the stars ground what is incomprehensible or unfathomable in science and the rational. If Lê’s photographs bring to light past and present moments of war, instability and despair, they also seek awe and comfort in acts of immersive viewings and communing with the cosmos and nature.