Installation views Trinh T. Minh-ha, Traveling in the Dark, Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai.
© Trinh T. Minh-ha
Courtesy Rockbund Art Museum

Born in Vietnam, Trinh T. Minh-ha is a film director, poet, writer, music composer, literary and art theorist, and distinguished professor in the departments of Gender & Women’s Studies and of Rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley.

After a three-year close collaboration with Trinh T. Minh-ha, I was thrilled to curate for the Rockbund Art Museum (RAM) Traveling in the Dark, an art project that brings together an exhibition, a series of events, and a publication. Offering a unique experience of RAM architecture by a subtle distribution of the daylight with colored filters dispatched on the windows, as well as flowing water projections at the entrance of some galleries, creating interesting dialogues between the white cubes of the Museum and the different black cubes built up for movie screenings, the exhibition features a selection of Trinh T. Minh-ha’s major films, a reading room gathering the publications of the artist, a dedicated space for collective learning and unique screening events like the newly produced movie "What About China?". The fifth floor gallery also invite the visitor to walk around different aphorisms written by Trinh T. Minh-ha and printed on semi-transparent films suspended from the ceiling.

As a visual, sonic, poetic, and philosophical experience, Traveling in the Dark intends to invite audiences to rethink reality differently from an approach based on “knowledge.” The play of visibility and invisibility—or what is seen, not seen and unseen—runs through the whole of Trinh T. Minh-ha’s work. In an open montage made up of resonances, vibrations, recollections, exchanges, brushes, reflections, and passages, this project undermines any pretense of a fixed identity, a historical truth, or a prescribed territory, and reflects on and questions the spaces opened up by the dark. Traveling in the Dark is also part of a major collaborative research project spanning 2019 to 2022 between RAM and a number of prestigious art institutions including NTU Center for Contemporary Art (Singapore), Wattis Institute (San Francisco), and Württembergischer Kunstverein (Stuttgart).

What About China? is a 135-minute experimental film essay directed, written, and edited by Trinh T. Minh-ha, released in 2022 and distributed in the US by Women Make Movies. The film revisits low-resolution Hi8 video footage Minh-ha shot in rural China in the early 1990s (specifically 1993–1994) to explore the country’s complex narratives, focusing on architecture, urbanization, and the concept of harmony.
Minh-ha reanimates this archival material through photomontage, oral histories, poetry, and folk songs to interrogate the mercurial nature of China nearly half a century after the Cultural Revolution. The film features voice-overs from figures such as Xiaolu Guo and examines the dynamic relationships between self, community, and state, while addressing the "Great Uprooting" and the preservation of traditional communal spaces like Hakka houses.

Produced by Jean-Paul Bourdier "Moongift Films", co-produced by Ute Meta Bauer and Larys Frogier, co-commissioned by NTU CCA Singapore and the Rockbund Art Museum (Shanghai), the film has received significant critical acclaim, including the New:Vision Award at CPH:DOX 2022, the Golden Gate Persistence of Vision Award at the San Francisco International Film Festival, and the Prix Bartók at the Jean Rouch International Film Festival 2022. It was also featured in the 2022 Whitney Biennial and continues to screen internationally, with recent in-person events and conversations with the artist.

Movie trailer Trinh T. Minh-ha, What About China?

Publication

Mousse Publishing
Edited by Trinh T. Minh-ha and Larys Frogier

Foreword by Larys Frogier, and interviews with Ute Meta Bauer, Kaori Nakasone and Mayumo Inoue, Shivani Radhakrishnan, Benjamin Schultz-Figueroa and Patricia Alvarez Astacio

Published in 2023
English
288 pages
Hardcover
17 x 23.5 cm
€ 30 / $ 35

ISBN 9788867495627

Traveling in the Dark is an exhibition and a publication by the world-renowned film director, poet, writer, music composer, literary critic, and art theorist Trinh T. Minh-ha, a distinguished professor in the departments of Gender & Women’s Studies and Rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley. The book is a fully fledged artistic project conceived by Trinh from the script and visuals of her film What about China? and expanded with her writings, poems, and aphorisms as well as various interviews that investigate “a relationship to infinity,” “memory of the mirror,” and the “in-between.” The book offers an experience with many possible entries, words, voices, thoughts, images, and pauses. As a visual, poetic, and philosophical experience, Traveling in the Dark invites us to rethink and experience “reality” differently from an approach mainly based on knowledge and re-presentation that we already possess or that is imposed on us. In other words: How can we learn to see our world without a priori seeing and knowing? In a time when the “all-seen” and “all-told” invade and control our daily lives, our private spheres and urban spaces, where are the areas of invisibility and shadows that leave us autonomy to see and to think, to say and to represent, to remember and to imagine? Traveling in the Dark engages the visitor and reader in an open montage of visual, sonic, and poetic textures, whose resonances, vibrations, recollections, exchanges, brushes, reflections, and passages undermine any pretense of fixed identity, historical truth, or prescribed territory. The exhibition and publication are supported by the Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai.