Untitled (7 Events): Pham Minh Hieu

12 March - 4 May 2024
Overview
Pham Minh Hieu The Laboratory for Experimental (Meta)physics (Room 1F), 2024 Site-specific video installation, 5.1 surround sound, wooden, bench, matte ceramic tiles, elevated structure dimensions variable edition of 3 plus 1 AP
Pham Minh Hieu
The Laboratory for Experimental (Meta)physics (Room 1F), 2024
Site-specific video installation, 5.1 surround sound, wooden, bench, matte ceramic tiles, elevated structure
dimensions variable
edition of 3 plus 1 AP

Galerie Quynh is excited to present Untitled (7 Events) — a major solo exhibition by Hanoi-based artist Pham Minh Hieu. Developed over the past 10 years, Untitled (7 Events) is an exhibition of exhibitions with theoretical underpinnings in speculative realism and new materialism. Pham has created imaginative ‘total installations’ that immerse spectators in an aesthetic experience. This way of making allows for divergence where different disciplines and genres intertwine, their boundaries fraying and transforming.

 

Untitled (7 Events) unfolds in fragments that float, rest, glide and accelerate over three floors, existing across different scales and temporalities, each exerting their own autonomy and agency. Pham states, “I don’t believe that the exhibition is somehow larger than the sum of its parts, the individual installations. I am an advocate for the heterarchical thinking of Bruno Latour and his belief that ‘the smallest entities are always richer in difference and complexity than their aggregates’ and ‘the big, the whole, the great [...] is only a simpler, more standardized version [of the small].’”
 
Divided into individual rooms — Somewhere, The Gallery, The Study and The Laboratory for Experimental (Meta) physics – the ensemble of events is disorienting, challenging our senses of perception, biases, and logic. Throughout the exhibition (1 event), independent installations (5 events) lure spectators (1 event) in with a vague sense of the familiar but then confound with works that require a suspension of belief. Spectators are trapped in the tension between their own subjectivity and the conflict that exists in the unknown objects themselves. To paraphrase Graham Harman, the founder of object-oriented ontology, objects can only be approached obliquely; they cannot be translated perfectly. An object is more than its description or anything that can be done with it. Pham’s events suggest the inexhaustible. They are wonderfully strange, filled with allusion that cannot be literalized.
 
Each of the individual events becomes entangled with the beholder and collapses hierarchies between modes of perception, materials, and making: handmade mosaics from the ancient ceramic village of Bat Trang collide with modern scanning electron microscopy; a spectator responding to innovative sound engineering runs up and down the stairwell in an attempt to comprehend intangible conversations; the longstanding genre of self-portraiture is reimagined in the form of a kinetic cast of the artist’s arm wired with a GPS to track his movements in real time; a dreamy, neon-lit, sand-filled room reveals a spatial sketch of an Einstein gedanken experiment; and stepping onto an embankment in a darkened room propels us on a perpetual train journey to the unknown.
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