Quý Trương Minh
The Woman Next Door - Installation - 2021
presented as part of the exhibition Panorama 23
Installation
Installation: foam mattress sculpture, video on TV monitor, chairs, plastic curtains.
The Woman Next Door is an installation that expresses the poetry of domestic space as a memorial for those who died (alone). The centre of this installation is a mattress sculpture. A mattress embodies a circle of life: on it one is born, on it one dies. It is in itself a space of privacy and intimacy: having sex, sleeping, crying, dreaming. At a distance the mattress sculpture looks just like a normal bed, bare and white. Yet as the visitors contemplate on it longer, they will realize that its surface is abnormal: it is marked with contours, reliefs and forms that may evoke a landscape with mountains and rivers, but also —because this is a mattress— evoke the remanent image of a human body imprinted on the bed: an idea of deforming, of decaying, of being absent. The imprints on the mattress surface are a transformation of a damaged family photograph that belongs to an old woman who died. The transforming process starts with the work of a geologist to create an imaginative map from the photograph, then the map will be converted into the mattress. In the small acreage of a double bed size 135x191cm, one starts to dream, yet, through the other’s body.
Quý Trương Minh
Quý Trương Minh was born in Buon Ma Thuot, a small city in the Central Highlands of Vietnam. His narratives and images, located between documentary and fiction, personal and impersonal, draw on the landscape of his homeland, childhood memories, and the history of Vietnam. His films have been selected for international film festivals and exhibitions such as Locarno, New York, Berlin, CPH:Dox, Viennale, Clermont-Ferrand, Oberhausen, Rotterdam, Busan. He won the main Art Prize at the 20th VideoBrasil (São Paulo) in 2017. Currently he is experimenting with new mediums and ideas at Le Fresnoy – Studio national des arts contemporains in France.
