Jacqueline Hoàng Nguyễn (born 1979,

Montreal, Quebec Montreal is the List of towns in Quebec, largest city in the Provinces and territories of Canada, province of Quebec, the List of the largest municipalities in Canada by population, second-largest in Canada, and the List of North American cit ...

) is a Canadian-born artist currently living in

Stockholm Stockholm (; ) is the Capital city, capital and List of urban areas in Sweden by population, most populous city of Sweden, as well as the List of urban areas in the Nordic countries, largest urban area in the Nordic countries. Approximately ...

, Sweden. Her art practice is primarily research-based and often takes the form of installation,

video Video is an Electronics, electronic medium for the recording, copying, playback, broadcasting, and display of moving picture, moving image, visual Media (communication), media. Video was first developed for mechanical television systems, whi ...

, photographs and

audio Audio most commonly refers to sound, as it is transmitted in signal form. It may also refer to: Sound *Audio signal, an electrical representation of sound *Audio frequency, a frequency in the audio spectrum *Digital audio, representation of sound ...

. She received her BFA from

Concordia University Concordia University () is a Public university, public English-language research university located in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. Founded in 1974 following the merger of Loyola College (Montreal), Loyola College and Sir George Williams Universit ...

(2003), her post-graduate diploma in Critical Studies from the

Malmö Art Academy Malmö Art Academy is an art school as part of Lund University in Lund, Sweden Sweden, formally the Kingdom of Sweden, is a Nordic countries, Nordic country located on the Scandinavian Peninsula in Northern Europe. It borders Norway to th ...

(2005) and is a graduate of the Whitney Independent Study Program.

Themes

Some of the themes that surface in Nguyen's work include resistance, power, and feminism. Many of her projects look at how histories are recorded within archival records and reclaim narratives of activism and citizen-led solidarity networks. As such, her work often creates new archives or explores existing archives, including ''Making of an Archive'' which explores the everyday of immigrants to Canada and looking at the work of

Olive Morris Olive Elaine Morris (26 June 1952 – 12 July 1979) was a Jamaican-born British-based community leader and activist in the feminist, black nationalist, and squatters' rights campaigns of the 1970s. At the age of 17, she claimed she was assaul ...

, as a member of the Remembering Olive Collective (ROC).

Works

In her 25-channel sound installation ''For An Epidemic Resistance'' (2009), Nguyen explores a laughing epidemic which took place in 1962 in Tanganyika. In an article which appeared in Fuse Magazine in 2013, Amber Berson wrote that "the outbreak of laughter ..lasted for six months and first occurred at a mission-run boarding school for ..we can choose to read the girls' laughter as a form of resistance against their patriarchal society and the colonizers at their mission-run institution ..Yet the girls' weapon – laughter – eventually shut down the school (and other institutions), proving it an effective means of resistance, which Nguyen celebrates in her piece." Another work, ''Space Fiction & the Archives'' (2012), deals with the Canadian centennial celebrations of 1967 and the incident of a Martian landing pad created to welcome

UFO An unidentified flying object (UFO) is an object or phenomenon seen in the sky but not yet identified or explained. The term was coined when United States Air Force (USAF) investigations into flying saucers found too broad a range of shapes ...

s to

St. Paul, Alberta St. Paul, originally known as St-Paul-de-Métis or St-Paul-des-Métis, is a town in East-Northern Alberta, Canada that is surrounded by the County of St. Paul No. 19. It was known as St. Paul de(s) Métis between 1912 and 1936. The community of ...

. Nguyen "posits a relationship between science fiction and multiculturalism." Her work is highly researched, but also involves an element of

storytelling Storytelling is the social and cultural activity of sharing narrative, stories, sometimes with improvisation, theatre, theatrics or embellishment. Every culture has its own narratives, which are shared as a means of entertainment, education, cul ...

. Nguyễn's project, T''he Wages Dues Song'' (2016) takes up the work of The Wages Dues Collective, a

feminist Feminism is a range of socio-political movements and ideology, ideologies that aim to define and establish the political, economic, personal, and social gender equality, equality of the sexes. Feminism holds the position that modern soci ...

collective formed in 1974 in

Toronto Toronto ( , locally pronounced or ) is the List of the largest municipalities in Canada by population, most populous city in Canada. It is the capital city of the Provinces and territories of Canada, Canadian province of Ontario. With a p ...

, Ontario, Canada, which was linked to the

Wages for housework A wage is payment made by an employer to an employee for work done in a specific period of time. Some examples of wage payments include compensatory payments such as ''minimum wage'', ''prevailing wage'', and ''yearly bonuses,'' and remunera ...

movement in the US. The work appeared as part of the recent exhibition The Let Down Reflex, which ran from January 30 – March 12, 2016 a
EFA Project Space
in New York. Jacqueline Hoàng Nguyễn's work has been exhibited at The New Gallery, MAI (Montréal, arts interculturels),

Momenta Art Momenta Art was an artist-run, not-for-profit organization and gallery, which from its founding in 1986 to its closing in 2016, exhibited and promoted emerging artists and underrepresented artistic perspectives. Artists who received support from Mo ...

, Kunstverein Braunschweig, VOX: Centre de l’image contemporaine, the MTL BNL,

A Space A Space is a Canadian artist-run centre located in Toronto, Ontario Background The gallery originated as the Nightingale Arts Council in 1970, and was founded in 1971. The name ''A Space Gallery'' was first used when the gallery established itse ...

, Apexart,

PAVED Arts PAVED Arts is a new media art Artist run centre located in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada that focuses on what it calls the 'PAVED Arts' arts: photography, audio, video, electronic and digital. PAVED operates an access centre for media production ...

, Or Gallery, and the Philadelphia Institute of Contemporary Art. In addition to her work as an artist, Nguyen is also a curator, a writer, and an educator. Her work is included in several public and private collections in Canada, Sweden, and the United States, including the NARS Foundation (Brooklyn, US). Nguyễn's project The Making of an Archive was initiated in 2014 at Gendai Gallery, in Toronto, with curator Maiko Tanaka. The Making of an Archive is a grassroots archival project aimed at capturing images of everyday life of the immigrant experience in Canada. The project involved digitization workshops where the artist invited immigrants and their families, who identify as persons of colour, to scan their photographs and ephemera. The project continued in 2017 at

grunt gallery The grunt gallery is a Canadian artist-run centre, founded in 1984 and located in Vancouver, British Columbia. They show work by both Indigenous and non-Indigenous artists. History Established in 1984, and founded by Glenn Alteen, Kempton Dexte ...

in Vancouver. Although the project is described as ongoing, a publication dedicated to the project was published by grunt gallery in 2018.

Honours

* Production Programme, Sharjah Art Foundation, 2016 * Sobey Art Award, Longlist, 2015 * The Swedish Arts Grants Committee International Program for Visual Arts, International Exhibition Grant, 2013

References

External links

Official siteThe Making of an Archive
{{DEFAULTSORT:Nguyen, Jacqueline Hoang Living people Canadian installation artists Women installation artists Canadian conceptual artists Women conceptual artists 21st-century Canadian artists 21st-century Canadian women artists Concordia University alumni Lund University alumni Canadian expatriates in Sweden 1979 births