It’s the last weekend to see Jacqueline Hoang Nguyen’s Space Fiction & the Archives, a project about comings and goings, co-habitation, and a UFO landing pad.
The two-faceted research project Space Fiction & the Archives is comprised of a film titled 1967: A People Kind of Place and an installation composed of archival material such as photographs, ephemera, and small sculptures. Through these works the artist investigates a forgotten monument built in the Canadian prairies that was erected as part of the Canada’s Centennary projects.
The small community of St. Paul, located 300km north east of Edmonton, inaugurated the world’s first UFO Landing Pad on June 3, 1967 with the aim to symbolically welcome the whole world and inter-galactic beings to Canada. Coupling science-fiction and identity politics, the artist’s focus revolves around the intersection of the notion of hospitality, diversity, and the implementation of Canada’s radical immigration policy which occurred that same year and posited the country as the instigator of multiculturalism. Here, the UFO landing pad functions as a conceptual vessel for addressing issues around the ideological formation of multiculturalism and the concept alien as understood in its broader sense.
French-speaking Quebecer of Vietnamese origin, Jacqueline Hoang Nguyen is a research-based artist currently living and working in Brooklyn and Stockholm. Using a broad range of mediums, her artistic practice is informed by feminist theory and in her work she investigates issues of historicity, collectivity, utopian politics, and multiculturalism. She aims to reveal the unnoticed political relevance of seemingly trivial historical anecdotes by shedding a unique light on stories deemed otherwise insignificant.
http://www.jacquelinehoangnguyen.com/Space-Fiction-the-Archives
Momenta Art
56 Bogart Street, Bushwick
Gallery hours: 12-6pm
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