When Water Embraces Empty Space

In the organizer's words:

At the center of Tuấn Andrew Nguyễn's new solo exhibition, When Water Embraces Empty Space, is the image of an impressive, handcrafted wooden boat. Video installations, photographs and collaboratively produced objects scattered throughout the house tell the story of this boat, which extends to the present day.

The Luf boat, a 16-meter-long outrigger sailboat, is named after the island of Luf in Papua New Guinea from which it originates. The local, long-standing knowledge of plants and the sea that was required to build such a boat is highly remarkable. Generations of people who grew up in Berlin know this magnificent object from school trips to the Ethnological Museum in Dahlem. Since 2020, pieces from the museum's collection have been on display at the Humboldt Forum, where the Luf-Boot is presented as a showpiece of the institution.

In his book The Magnificent Boat, historian Götz Aly reveals that there is a dark and disturbing story behind the Luf-Boat's arrival in Berlin. The object is inextricably linked to the ongoing violence perpetrated by the Imperial Navy and German merchants on the people of Papua New Guinea. The island's forest and natural resources were destroyed and replaced by plantations on which the indigenous population was forced to work; indigenous women were raped by the colonizers. If islanders resisted these atrocities, the imperial navy - as in the case of Luf - ordered them to be killed by so-called "punitive expeditions".

In 2021, the Humboldt Forum commissioned a video interview with descendants of the few survivors who had survived the colonial violence on Luf. In it, they expressed their desire to see the boat. They regretted that their community had lost the knowledge of how to build such vessels and expressed the hope of reconnecting with the boat.

This is where Tuấn Andrew Nguyễn's explorations began: His aim was to fulfill this wish and make the encounter possible. The artist sees the Luf-Boot as a bridge between the past and the future, between the prevailing narrative of German colonialism and the erased stories of the people of Papua New Guinea. It is a bridge between fact and fiction, between testimony and resilience.

A series of video installations together tell a story; these are based on conversations between the descendants of the builders of the Luf boat - Stanley Inum, Stanley Fordy and Enoch Lun - and the Humboldt Forum team, but also include documentation of the islanders' long-awaited encounter with the boat. Other videos document how the Luf community is rebuilding the boat. The aim was to create something that would bridge the gap between the object and history, between those who made it and those who keep it, between trauma and healing.

Colonialism destroys and dominates memory. What strategies do we have to restore memory after all the destruction? Can fiction fill the gaps and have a healing effect in the remaining voids?

Perhaps the boat should glide out of the museum in which it is exhibited and disappear into the sea as it was originally intended - a burial at sea for the leader of Luf. Or as a broader, more metaphorical burial of the perpetuation of colonial ideals in the present.

Tuấn Andrew Nguyễn's artistic practice explores the power of memory and its potential to become a form of political resistance. The Vietnamese-American artist's work is based on research and his commitment to communities traumatized by colonialism, war and displacement. Through his numerous attempts to address fading or lost historical memories, Nguyễn documents the erasure caused by the colonial project in many regions of the world. In his collaborative practice, he explores memory as a form of resistance and empowerment, emphasizing how storytelling can foster healing, empathy and solidarity.

Nguyễn has been awarded several film and art prizes; he received a grant from the Art Matters Foundation in 2010 and was supported by the VIA Art Fund. In 2023, he was awarded the Joan Miró Foundation Prize. His works have been shown in numerous international exhibitions, including the Asia Pacific Triennial 2006, the Whitney Biennial 2017, the Sharjah Biennial 2019 and the Berlin Biennial 2022.

In 2006, Nguyễn co-founded The Propeller Group, a platform for collectivity that sits between an art collective and an advertising agency. The group received the main prize at the 19th International Short Film Festival Winterthur 2015 for the film The Living Need Light, The Dead Need Music and an award from Creative Capital for their video project Television Commercial for Communism. In addition to an extensive traveling retrospective that began at the MCA Chicago, the collective has participated in international exhibitions including The Ungovernables [New Museum Triennial 2012], the LA Biennial 2012, Prospect3 [New Orleans Triennial 2014] and the Venice Biennale 2015.

After its first stop in Oldenburg, the exhibition will be shown in the cooperating exhibition spaces The Showroom, London and The Goldfarb Gallery at York University in Toronto.

Curated by Edit Molnár and Marcel Schwierin.