"The Past is a Distant Colony," video still

panel discussion “a measure of remorse”
February 18, 6–8 p.m.
Center for Documentary Studies Auditorium

Duke professors Fred Moten and Nayoung Aimee Kwon with video artist Hong-An Truong, in conjunction with a video installation by Truong, The Past Is a Distant Colony, on display at the John Hope Franklin Center at Duke University.

Hong-An Truong is an artist and writer based in Brooklyn. She has been an artist-in-resident at the Center for Photography at Woodstock and the Visual Studies Workshop. Her work has been shown at the Godwin-Ternbach Museum in Queens, the International Center for Photography in NY, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Laguna Art Museum, Torrance Art Museum, Oakland University Art Gallery, LAXART in Los Angeles, DobaeBacsa Gallery in Seoul, and the ISCP in NY. Last year, her work was included in 1968: Then and Now at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. Her work was screened in this year’s PDX Documentary and Experimental Film Festival and was recently included in a group show at Art in General in NY and a screening at DeSoto Gallery in Los Angeles. Upcoming shows include the BRIC Rotunda Gallery in Brooklyn, the Franklin Humanities Institute at Duke University in North Carolina, and Monte Vista Projects in Los Angeles. Truong received her MFA at the University of California, Irvine and recently completed the Whitney Independent Study Program.

This exhibit is organized around a trilogy of video pieces entitled Adaptation Fever (2007). Using found footage of Viet Nam during its French Indochina period, this project explores questions about the politics of representation and the construction of difference in relation to history, time, and memory. For more information on this and other works by Truong, please visit her website at http://www.hongantruong.com/

This exhibit is presented by Innovating Forms, the 2009-10 FHI Annual Seminar, and the John Hope Franklin Center — with support from the Asian/Pacific Studies Institute, Center for Documentary Studies, Department of Asian & Middle Eastern Studies, Department of Cultural Anthropology, FHI Working Group on Trans-Asian Screen Cultures, & Program in Women’s Studies.