super feelings episode three

Into The Violet Belly

Nguyen-Chi presents a new installation environment encompassing her film Into The Violet Belly (2022), recently presented at the 12th Berlin Biennale.

Between mother & daughter

The film recounts fragments of a woman's journey, from Vietnam, to Thailand and eventually Germany at the end of the American War in Vietnam. The film’s centrifugal force is a conversation between its co-directors, Nguyen-Chi and her mother Thuyen Hoa, plumbing the depths of family lore, mythology and memory. The camera rotates; sea becomes sky; a mythological creature is born in a cave along a rocky shoreline; a woman plunges into the South China Sea; a rotting marine carcass vibrates with life; all turns to blue.

In relation to architectural surroundings

Reimagining the film in relation to the Aula’s architecture and the building's recent history as a temporary refugee shelter, Nguyen-Chi presents new supporting sculptural objects: fragmented mirrors penetrating into the screen and washed ashore onto the sandflat. The mirrors reflect and refract the architectural surroundings of de Appel, while simultaneously displacing the solidity of the projected image and questioning the certainty of vision.

Concert

On the 13th of October 2022, Thuy-Han Nguyen-Chi invites Frankie to perform a live version of Into The Violet Belly’s soundtrack—a song based on the poem Learning Late Letters by Quyen Nguyen-Hoang, a Vietnamese writer and poet—alongside selected tracks from her debut solo release Styx. Following the performance, episode 3 will be open for ten consecutive days at de Appel.