Here/there: chúng tôi

Here/There: Chúng Tôi takes a cumulative glance at the different ways care has been imbued in traditional practices of art making and reinvigorated with contemporaneous utterances of love for place, love for family, love for community, and love for cultural traditions. Through the varying practices from eight artists across the United States, Canada, and Việt Nam, the exhibition takes a moment to champion, to celebrate, and to relish in the adaptation of care in culture, community, and tradition; in ways that are alive, new, and transformative. Here/There: Chúng Tôi takes a loving look at the way community is felt, practiced, and received through these shared moments of being and becoming. 

As a multi-media show, Here/There: Chúng Tôi is a reflection of community based archival work in contemporary art practices, as a methodology of preserving, creating, and transforming the interstices of culture and care via interjecting with personal histories, readjustment, and alternate narratives in which reinvigorates communal memory and autonomy.   

Culture making and community building, shown through this show, is done through the active practice of art making which relies simultaneously on the past and present. Here/There: Chúng Tôi takes a gentle gaze towards tradition and how contemporaneity has transformed the way gestures of care can affect community and shifts between physical, non-physical, and between here and there.  

In the toggling between tradition, folklore and myth, memory, heritage, ecology, and place, the artists within the exhibition, articulate their individual lived experiences through different mediums, and memories to reimagine their positions within community. Their work communicates visually and aesthetically how these differing iterations of cultural practices produce a composition of new traditions, and ways to manifest and connect to affect, presence, and participation.