RE/HOMING: Walk-ins Welcome - Vietnamese Diaspora

ABOUT THE EXHIBITION

In a moment of intensive immigration enforcement, RE/HOMING: WALK-INS WELCOME takes up the stakes and questions raised by the mass resettlement of the first Vietnamese refugees 50 years ago. Five Vietnamese artists living in the diaspora use queer and feminist approaches to challenge masculinist visions of homelands lost and nations defended. Together, they re-cast the gallery space as a site of unequivocal welcome, asserting that re/homing means returning to the discarded members of our own communities.

ARTISTS:

Christina Hughes' work brings together writing in postcolonial theory, critical refugee studies, critical Pr*son studies, and racial capitalism to trace the colonial continuities and carceral afterlives of the wars in Southeast Asia as they have come to shape our current ‘crimmigration’ state and orientation towards who is considered deportable.

Ngoc Bui is an audio producer currently working for MPR News. Ngoc came into practices of audio, storytelling, and documentation through their time with the International Women Space in Berlin, Germany, and continues to produce audio projects like their most recent collaboration with the Vietnamese Boat People podcast.

Ly T Nguyen (she/they) is a bilingual queer scholar, translator, and artist. Their creative and academic work gear towards feminist practices and imaginations of collective liberation. Ly’s most recent writings are with tiếng-thét and vănguard. Ly currently teaches in the Critical Race and Ethnicity Studies department at Augsburg University.

Quyên N-L (Nguyễn-Lê) is a queer Vietnamese filmmaker born to boat refugee parents where Chumash and Tongva lands meet in Los Ángeles, California. Quyên's film work–spanning between documentary and scripted genres–focuses on the ways histories are deeply felt in the quotidian everyday. Nước (Water/Homeland) (2016) and Hoài (Ongoing, Memory) (2018) delve into the intersections of queer Vietnamese American identity.

Nhung Walsh is a Chicago-based artist and curator from Hanoi, Vietnam who explores the intersection of personal history and collective memory through her work. Her practice, informed by Vietnam's postwar narratives and the politics of war memory, blends art and curation in long-term, interactive exhibitions. Notable projects include Nối Projects (since 2012), Saigon Blueprint (since 2015), and the Vietnam Artists' Book Project (since 2012).

MORE ABOUT THE EXHIBITION:

Right before the United States passed the Refugee Act of 1980 geared towards formalizing the resettlement of Southeast Asian refugees, a CBS/New York Times poll found that 62% of the American public disapproved of the bill’s passage compared to the 34% who stated that they approved. Reflecting a deeper history of xenophobia and distrust towards migrants and refugees made worse by the economic recession of the 1970s, the passage of the law precipitated a wave of reactionary backlash that demanded refugees take less welfare support and find work as quickly as possible, with those unable to conform oftentimes criminalized and punished. In many ways those debates over refugee status, state citizenship, and deservingness are still driving the current political feelings and atmosphere that characterize American politics today. REHOMING: WALK-INS WELCOME thus takes up the stakes and questions that both the 50 year anniversary and current period of intensive immigration enforcement make clear. Carving out space for us to consider how these xenophobic responses rely on manufactured scarcity and ethnonationalist racism to demonize asylum seekers and migrants, REHOMING instead re-casts the gallery space as a site of unequivocal welcome wherein discarded memories of refugee labor, embodiment, time, movement, ancestry, and placemaking are critically considered alongside matrilineal memories and practices of how we might exist and imagine otherwise. In bringing together both Vietnamese diasporic and Vietnamese national perspectives, the exhibit asserts that part of finding home relies on returning to the discarded members of our own communities, whose conditions of disposability insist that there is something more to say–and do–about these wars and their many afterlives.

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