Arlette Quynh-Anh Tran
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In her moving image work Elysium without Shores, Arlette Quynh-Anh Tran imagines a futurist múa bóng rỗi ritual on an island in the Co Chien River of the Mekong Delta – a historical crossroads of Greco-Roman influences and the Funan Oc Eo civilization. In this speculative world, modernist architecture serves as a source of power for cosmic cyborgs who inhabit the land, figuring prominently in their rituals, which are further explored in the lenticular works The Spinning Shadows. The ritual culminates in the destruction of a hydroelectric dam system – located at the source of the Mekong River – which has adversely affected the delicate ecologies the river runs through. This climatic and cosmic act of destruction represents both a critique of contemporary industrialization and a symbolic reclamation of modernization’s trajectories that have gone awry.
(Edited from text excerpts provided by Gallery Medium)