by Nora Taylor, 06/05/2016, SOAS
“This presentation will look at four artists, Loo Zihan, Koh Nguang How, Tran Anh Quan and Nguyen Van Tien, who have created performance pieces that narrate art historical events or that make references to the art historical past. These works are cases where documentation, art history or archives are the work rather than the aftermath of the work. They not only comment on art history but also on the nature of performance art, documentation and the role of the archive in art history. More than making art history present and performative, these artists are proposing to look at performance art events as sites of memory and counter memory, or lieux de mémoire as the historian Pierre Nora has called them, in other words sites that challenge the public, and the audience, to recall certain events and their individual histories.”