Connecting people through art 

We are glad to announce the presentation of 47 Days, Sound-less by Vietnamese artist Nguyễn Trinh Thi, at Singapore Art Museum, from 12 January to 14 April 2024.

This piece, commissioned by the Han Nefkens Foundation in collaboration with the Mori Art Museum, M+, Hong Kong, and Singapore Art Museum, is the outcome of Nguyễn Trinh Thi winning the inaugural edition of the Han Nefkens Foundation, Mori Art Museum, M+, Hong Kong, and Singapore Art Museum – Moving Image Commission 2021. 

We are also pleased to extend an invitation to the artist's talk Tea with Nguyễn Trinh Thi, an event taking place on Saturday 20 January at 2.30pm, at SAM, part of the public programme of the Singapore Art Week.

Join the artist and SAM curator Syaheedah Iskandar as they chat about sense perception and cultural memory over afternoon tea and bites. Hear from the artist about the many influences across media and culture in the artwork 47 Days, Sound-less.

In this presentation, visitors will be drawn into Nguyễn’s identification of the “peripheries”, featuring natural landscapes used as backdrops, uncredited characters and soundtracks from American and Vietnamese movies filmed in Southeast Asia. Borrowing lines from Ursula K. Le Guin’s science fiction novels, the artist meticulously weaves reconstructed images of trees, leaves and the sky alongside echoing soundscapes of dripping water, chirping crickets and birds, interspersed with visuals and sounds of the Jarai people from Vietnam’s Central Highlands. Challenging conventional ideas of spectatorship while questioning the dominance of vision in cinematic storytelling, a system of mirrors at the centre of the artwork reflects fragments of these footage onto the surrounding walls, offering new ways of meditating upon the inextricable relationship between a place and its inhabitants.

Through foregrounding these more-than-human perspectives, Nguyễn draws attention to the interconnectedness of nature and all living things and celebrates the richness of the human condition, indigenous cultures and their knowledge systems, particularly those found in Vietnam.

Presented as an “expanded cinema”, 47 Days, Sound-less creates a contemplative environment where visuals, sounds and forms of listening prompt a re-evaluation of being present in the natural world while reflecting on our modes of seeing.

Nguyễn Trinh Thi is a Hanoi-based experimental filmmaker and moving image/media artist whose practice over the last decade has consistently engaged with the history and memory of Vietnam. She has found innovative ways to connect cinema and the moving image with sound practices, performance and alternative forms of storytelling. Thi uses montage to compose her work, drawing on different media, from her own audio and visual recordings to found footage and still images from postcards, photography, newsreels, Hollywood films and ethnographic footage. Her practice currently explores the power of sound and listening, and the multiple relations between image, sound and space, with ongoing interests in memory, representation, landscape, indigeneity and ecology.

Her works have been shown at Thailand Biennale, Chiang Rai (2023), documenta fifteen, Kassel (2022), Minneapolis Institute of Art (2019), Biennale Jogja XV, Yogyakarta (2019), 9th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, Brisbane (2018), 21st Biennale of Sydney (2018), International Film Festival Rotterdam (2016), Jeu de Paume, Paris (2015), CAPC musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux (2015), 13th Lyon Contemporary Art Biennale (2015) and Asian Art Biennial, Taichung (2015), among others. Thi is the director of Hanoi DOCLAB, an independent centre for documentary film and moving image art she founded in 2009.

The Han Nefkens Foundation, Mori Art Museum, M+, Hong Kong and Singapore Art Museum – Moving Image Commission aims to be a tool for increasing contemporary artistic production within the field of moving images. It is directed at artists of Asian origin, nationality or living in Asia who have established a solid trajectory but have not been given a major opportunity to exhibit in world-recognised institutions. The Commission is organised by the Han Nefkens Foundation in collaboration with Singapore Art Museum, M+, Hong Kong and the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo.