Huong Ngo

I'm going to talk about a few recent collaborative projects at this panel at The Sculpture Center:

Translating Spaces: Translating Law

Saturday, March 17, 2012, 4:00-5:30PM
With LaToya Ruby Frazier, Sina Najafi, Huong Ngo, and Sean Raspet
Moderated by Kristen Chappa and Sergio Muñoz Sarmiento
Website

SculptureCenter and Volunteer Lawyers for the Arts are proud to present the conversation Translating Spaces: Translating Law. Panelists will discuss projects that are situated in between the physical and immaterial, the public and private, and the artistic and legal. Some projects enact discursive, conceptual gestures through enforceable agreements, while others raise legal issues in specific geographic spaces and virtual communities. Often co-opting and repurposing multiple spaces as a strategy, these artists destabilize notions of use, appropriation, and function in relation to property, particularly when considering the problematic of increasingly hybrid, interconnected sites, spaces, and loci.

The Dream Machine will have a special posting on March 18th, just for one day for SITE Sante Fe's March 2012 project where they are featuring one work every day for the whole month. It will be a special selection of dreams from this past year, edited just for this.

We worked with EFA Project Space to put together this blog of images, text, and resources from the Acting the Words is Enacting the World project from the summer. It is for students, educators, and everyone, so please use it!

We're so thrilled to receive the one of the 2011 commissions for further development on Fantastic Futures! Here are all of the projects that got an award. I'm excited to be in great company.

We've finally launched the ALPHA version of Fantastic Futures! It's beautiful and I can't wait for people to begin using it.

Here's a description:

Fantastic Futures is a collaborative group of students from Iraq and the United States. Together, we've created this online platform for mixing and sharing of recorded sounds and stories across cultures. Our goal is to connect citizens from nations in conflict in an open dialogue based around the sharing of field recordings, songs, and interviews. Hopefully, this might help to collapse the barriers of physical space that contribute to the misunderstandings between cultures and to emphasize the subversive value of sharing experiences across political borders.

The design and development team was led by myself, Or Zubalsky, and Andrew Persoff. We collaborated with the entire Fantastic Futures team on the concept for the site. You can get to know them here.

Acting the Words is Enacting the World

May 27-28, 12-6PM
Opening Reception: May 26, 2011, 6-8 PM
EFA Project Space
323 West 39th Street
New York, NY 10018
Website

"Against the illusion of choice, we make our way."

I am collaborating with Hong-An Truong and a fantastic group of young folks on a series of actions based on conversations around the economy, philosophy, and art. Together, we have been asking ourselves and the people around us: what does it mean to live a good life? How much is enough? How do we imagine the present? Why should we try? Through performances, interviews, installations, and screen printed posters, we attempt to represent our poetic acts of protest and frame our vision for the potentials of the future.

Trade School is relocating to the Whitney for the night and asked me to teach a class on weaving. I've teamed up with my New School "Art After Deleuze" class, taught by Sam Ishii-Gonzalez, to create this performative event:

Reading & Weaving

March 25, 2011, 8-9 PM
Whitney Museum of American Art
945 Madison Avenue
New York, NY 10021
Sign Up

Franz Kafka always imagined his stories read aloud. Like many writers, he would write stories in a single sitting, allowing the words to almost spill and trip over themselves and the story to unfold of its own dreamy accord. His stories thus became maps of his mental journey and its winding pathway into the outside world of the printed page. While artists often work in isolation, what happens when many people have the same external experience while engaging in a creative process? How might we map their subjective and inter-subjective experiences? In this performative class, pairs of weavers will respond, through their weavings, to stories read aloud, thereby mapping their experiences in the time-based medium of the weaving.

In this first iteration of Reading and Weaving, students will not be instructed in a traditional manner, but will be asked to learn from observation, experimentation, and their imagination. We will be reading and weaving to the chapter from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia entitled “The Smooth and the Striated.”

Special thanks to Sam Ishii-Gonzales, Assistant Professor of Film Studies, The New School.

Photo above: Escape (Performance Still), Huong Ngo, 2009-2011 (Director: Huong Ngo, Photographer: Paul O'Reilly, Performer: Daniel Martin)

I have some work in this upcoming show atThe Kitchen in New York.

Shame the Devil

Curated by Petrushka Bazin
March 17 – April 30, 2011
Opening Reception: Thursday, March 17, 6-8 PM
The Kitchen
512 West 19th Street
New York, NY
Website

The genre of comedy, in all its various manifestations in stand-up, theater, literature, television, and movies has long provided rich and valuable inspiration for artists seeking to critique contemporary society using parody, satire and dark humor. Inspired by the parallel ability of both the stand-up comedian and the artist to play the role of cultural observer and provacateur, this exhibition presents new sculpture, video, installations, and photography by artists, who strategically examine, with their frank observations and dry wit, the socio-political dimensions of power associated with cultural, racial, and economic issues. Titled after the longer idiom "tell the truth and shame the devil," which means to speak honestly and without censor, these artists, following the long traditions of political caricature, offer up wry send-ups of political commentary on such critical issues as global poverty, racial profiling, anti-terrorist paranoia, and right-wing extremism. Artists include: Jabari Anderson, Elizabeth Axtman, Michael Britto, Wayne Hodge, My Barbarian, Huong Ngo, Jessica Ann Peavy, Sara Greenberger Rafferty, Jimmy Joe Roche, and Kenya (Robinson).

I currently have a solo exhibit up at UNC-CH, my alma mater!

Your Flying Machines

February 15 – March 15, 2011
John & June Allcott Gallery
University of North Carolina

"...this project offers an aural and physical space to contemplate the impact of war machines on individual lives. "

"In Ngo’s installation, two shapes alternately dominate and evacuate the space of the gallery, as they slowly transform from full, vibrant spheres to empty, deflated mounds of black material. Recorded audio – a slow and contemplative story – is focused around two chairs in the center of the installation, offering a site for conversation and contemplation. Through personal narrative, the melodic recording contemplates the history of the aerial bombing of Hanoi and Hai Phong, Vietnam in 1972 by the United States. Ngo’s fantastic flying objects can be understood as both 'devices for escape and violence,' objects that allow us to consider such technological machines as possessing a kind of dualistic power. Your Flying Machines ultimately 'investigates how personal stories can confront and subvert such master narratives and productively influence our understanding of history by drawing from empathy, poetic engagement, and our lived experience.'”

I also have an upcoming performance/lecture with details below:

My lecture will include a performance with Hong-An Truong where we will re-enact a telephone conversation from April of 1972 between President Nixon and Henry Kissinger, secretly recorded by both men without the other’s knowledge, in which they candidly discuss the country’s recent and future bombing campaigns in Vietnam.

Hanes’ Visiting Artist Lecture Series: Huong Ngo

Tuesday, March 1, 2011, 6 PM
Allcott Gallery & Hanes Art Center auditorium
Admission: Free