PSYPER LAB: Xã hội diễn cảnh: Triển lãm cá nhân của Lại Diệu Hà >
do Vân Đỗ giám tuyển

For two decades, Lại Diệu Hà has made herself the subject of her own experiments, exploring tensions between the body, psychological life and society. She places her body and her life at the centre of the inquiry, as both a psychological terrain fraught with tension and an unstable archive where private desires, collective traumas and social norms continually collide, wear against one another and reshape one another.

Curated by Vân Đỗ, PSYPER LAB: The Society of the Spectacle brings twenty-five new oil paintings into dialogue with video documentation of performances dating back to 2006, bodily traces and sculptural installations. More than a decade after Hà’s first solo exhibition, Conservation of Vitality (Cuc Gallery, Hanoi, 2015), this major exhibition at Galerie Quynh traces the threads running through her performance, painting and installation where fleeting gestures return in layered visual histories, extending the life of a performance beyond the moment in which it took place.

Taking its name and structure from Psyper Lab, a collective experiment initiated by the artist in 2014, the exhibition is conceived as an imagined laboratory of its own. Bringing together Jacob L. Moreno’s therapeutic methods of psychodrama with Guy Debord’s concept of the spectacle, the exhibition considers how images mediate social relations and shape the roles people take on and assign to others in everyday life. It dissects the spectacles of social life to examine the stages on which these relations play out, and how seemingly private wounds are produced and enacted through collective judgement and expectations internalised through structures of discipline and control. Can exposing personal experience bring these mechanisms into view and loosen their hold, or might placing the body under the gaze and interpretations of others inflict further violence? Hà’s life itself has become an ongoing Psyper Lab, an experiment in which personal experience opens onto collective life, and the vulnerable body becomes a site from which to experience and question the world.

Widely known for performances that question gender norms and push the body to extremes, Hà’s practice has often been received through the lens of shock, as her actions became spectacles before a watching public with images later circulated detached from their original contexts. In returning to these images through painting, Hà takes them apart and grafts their fragments together on her own terms. Through the employment of détournement in repurposing and overturning their meanings, she reframes, skews and distorts scenes from her own performances while dismantling the visual structures through which her body was once labelled and scrutinised. The audience appears as a collective body within the very scene it is watching, and its gaze, judgements and expectations themselves come under watch. When figures in the paintings turn their eyes towards the viewer, this reversal of spectatorship extends into the exhibition space, whereby the viewer becomes part of the relations the paintings lay bare.

Drawing on her formal training and the visual strategies of her father’s propaganda posters she grew up with, Hà creates paintings that exist in the gap between an experience and the images that remain of it. By choosing which images to revisit, juxtapose and transform, she revises what the documentation seems to have fixed and how an art history, or history broadly, is written, artistically. What remains or is lost when an action becomes an image, a performance is condensed into a painting, or an experience is retold as a narrative? By reversing the roles of those who look and those who are looked at, Hà unsettles the social relations those images sustain.

Alongside the paintings, the exhibition draws on surviving traces to document and reactivate two decades of Lại Diệu Hà’s performance practice, continuing the curatorial research into performance as a historiographical method. Video documentation, props, costumes, material traces and the body itself are brought together in spatial arrangements that blur the boundary between archival material and artwork. What survives bears the marks of choices made behind the camera, the limits of preservation and the effects of decay over time. A gesture that once held the audience’s attention may become difficult to discern, while an incidental object may outlast the recording and become the only evidence that a performance took place. In this space of post-performance, what remains shapes how the work is seen, remembered and historicized. Each new presentation rearranges these fragments, shifting the scale and vantage point from which the spectacle is seen and gradually dismantling it.

PSYPER LAB: The Society of the Spectacle is a solo exhibition by Lại Diệu Hà, curated by Vân Đỗ and presented by Galerie Quynh, with the generous support of the Goethe-Institut.