Symposium: Ghosts and Spectres – Shadows of History Session 1: Shadows of HistoryPresentation: “On distances between an Artist and her Subjects” by Nguyen Trinh Thi, artist

The Single Screen, Block 43 Malan Road

Focusing on the process of filming Letters from Panduranga (2015), Nguyen will elaborate on the motives that drive her artistic practice, while foregrounding her research on the Cham community in Vietnam and their threatened existence. The artist will discuss how the epistolary form of the film, which takes as its basic structure an exhange of letters between a man and a woman, activates broader questions about artistic representation and ethnography. Nguyen will also give an account of her interest in the unknown, which presents itself in her practice as a generative concept that undergirds her strategies of resistance against the comprehensibility and linearity of history, the power and authority of the image, and the regimes of narrative and representation.