Jacqueline Hoàng Nguyễn

Simon Fraser University’s School for the Contemporary Arts (SCA) is pleased to welcome Jacqueline Hoàng Nguyễn as the SCA’s 2017 spring Audain Visual Artist in Residence. Nguyễn is a research-based artist currently living and working in Stockholm (Sweden). She uses a broad range of media while primarily relying on archival material to investigate issues of historicity, collectivity, utopian politics, and multiculturalism within the framework of feminist theories.

Together with the third-year visual art students, Jacqueline Hoàng Nguyễn will develop counter-archives of vernacular images and micro-histories. The artist proposes theoretical and aesthetic reflections on the significance of the archive and its aporias. The aim of the workshops is to investigate the function of the archive and how it can be built from the bottom up to counter the conventional historical narratives of settler colonialism. In contrast to given, state-constructed narratives, the everyday migrants’ or aboriginals' story is disordered, uneven, and complicated. Various archival modalities will be experimented with including unorthodox approaches to classification, contested notions and forms of representations of citizenship, and knowledge production. Within the context of the classroom, Nguyễn hopes to tease out the role of the artist as an activist archivist, which theorist Mark Wigley describes as “one who designs an archive whose purpose is to polemically rearrange the standard perception of the worlds outside [...] to change the direction of thinking.” The students’ work with the Audain Visual Artist in Residence will culminate in a project exhibited at Simon Fraser University’s Audain Gallery in March 2017.

Nguyễn will also run a series of digitizing workshops as part of The Making of an Archive, in partnership with Grunt Gallery, while in Vancouver (January 21-26, 2017). For more details, please contact the gallery.

Jacqueline Hoàng Nguyễn completed the Whitney Independent Study Program, New York, in 2011, having obtained her MFA and a post-graduate diploma in Critical Studies from the Malmö Art Academy, Sweden, in 2005, and a BFA from Concordia University, Montreal, in 2003. Nguyễn’s work has been shown internationally in institutions including the EFA Project Space (2016); Mercer Union, Toronto (2015); MTL BNL at the Musée d’Art Contemporain, Montreal (2014); Kunstverein Braunschweig, Germany (2013); Apexart, New York (2013); Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA), Philadelphia (2011); Mason Gross Galleries, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ (2011); and Gasworks, London (2010). In 2011 she was commissioned by CC Seven to produce a site-specific sound piece for The Woodland Cemetery, a UNESCO World Heritage site in Stockholm. In 2015, as part of SWICH, a collaborative project involving ten European museums of Ethnography and World Cultures she was the first artist-in-residence at the Museum of Ethnography in Stockholm. Currently she is working with curator Rado Ištok on editing Crating the World: Displaced Myths, Desires and Meanings, a compendium to Nguyễn's exhibition Black Atlas to be published in Spring 2017. Both the exhibition and publication are made possible with the generous support of Sharjah Art Foundation.

Events

Artist Talk: Jacqueline Hoàng Nguyễn

January 19, 2016, 7:00pm
Djavad Mowafaghian World Art Centre
SFU at Goldcorp Centre for the Arts
149 W. Hastings Street

Watch a video of the talk HERE.

Best Before: Archivised
SCA Third Year Visual Arts Exhibition

March 22 – April 1, 2016
Audain Gallery
SFU at Goldcorp Centre for the Arts
149 W. Hastings Street

Visit the exhibition's archived page HERE.

Jacqueline Hoàng Nguyễn working with third-year visual art students at the SCA's 611 Alexander Studios.