Multi-perspective, generative sound installation, the line #2 (2016) by Trần Văn Thảo, LED light.

Duration: Gallery business hours (10 am - 7 pm), Tuesday - Saturday.

Description

For The Gallery, Phạm Minh Hiếu has excavated the internet archives to simulate a conversation of multiple voices from history. The entries are reenacted by a voice actress (a hypothetical 'angel of history') whereby the narrator transcends the linear flow of time, observing and collecting stories, and then reenacting them once again.

The simulation exists in a different realm and can only be accessed through headphones. Once the headphones are on, audiences are transported to a virtual gallery space with a separate temporality from the one at the physical gallery, eavesdropping on what’s going on around them. The virtual gallery is filled with voices of the angel of history, speaking the contents coming from people who never actually conversed with one another. A specially written program weaves them together, composing them into conversation. Such conversations are completely generative and interspersed with them are special audio events whose sounds appear in each headset simultaneously but are spatialized. Every day the sound that goes through each point of view/headphone is different and unique. There is no finite number of conversations to hear. There is always a different retelling of history.

Spanning the entire 4-floor gallery space, a computer located on the ground floor broadcasts the audio source through a fascicle of cables running up and down the staircase void. Each cable then furcates to an individual binaural in-ear mixing system linked to a single headphone. These self-contained systems are then intentionally scattered throughout the space. The setup is like a stream of time that diverts and then divides into each of these four headphones, giving the audience licence to engage with these multi-dimensional and ever-changing histories. The program in the computer allows the headphones to simultaneously broadcast the same conversation at a given moment in time but from different spatial perspectives. The spatial and integrative nature of the work is also signified by intermittent special audio events sporadically triggered throughout the day. Due to the immersive in-ear mixing format, the conversations and the events are perceived in multiple directions both horizontally and vertically, the matrix of content surrounds the immobilised listener.

One predetermined position places the listeners toward that stream of time where they can glimpse at another element of The Gallery – Trần Văn Thảo’s the line #2 painting – through the gallery’s storeroom window. Trần Văn Thảo, one of Vietnam’s most important abstract painters and a close friend of the founder of Galerie Quynh since 1997, was also one of the first artists to be exhibited by the gallery in 2000. the line #2 was first presented in Thảo’s solo show that inaugurated the current gallery space in 2017. The painting, acting as a temporal focus – "as a kind of clock" – with historical significance, further suggests the flow of time and how multiple temporalities exist in the installation, continuously rewriting and overwriting one another.

Source: Galerie Quynh.