Tuấn Andrew Nguyễn’s works explore the modern history of Vietnam and the complex legacy of colonial violence through historical archives entangled with the tenderness and tenacity of personal memories and fictional strategies. In the video projection Because No One Living Will Listen / Người Sống Chẳng Ai Nghe (2023), a Moroccan-Vietnamese woman, Habiba, scavenges waste in the city for a living, searching for her father’s vanished grave in a vast grass field, looking for homes for both herself and her father’s soul under the Moroccan Gate in Hanoi. In a letter to her father, Habiba recounts her struggles in life, in marriage, in remembering, and in finding a sense of belonging. Habiba’s plight suggests a soft parallel to her father’s difficult identity as a Tirailleur under multiple negations: neither French nor Vietnamese, neither his family nor his body could return home. A pair of embroidered tapestries—titled Letters from the Other Side (2023)—recreates a propaganda leaflet in French and Arabic disseminated by the Việt Minh to North African Tirailleurs, calling for peace and friendship between the colonized Vietnamese and Moroccans. In the second video Our Empty Uniforms Marched To The Echoes Of An Invisible (2020–ongoing), archival documents come to the fore. Two sets of historical footage of the Tirailleurs Sénégalais and the Tirailleurs Indochinois are juxtaposed to illustrate the confrontations and intimacies between the African and South East Asian troops.

Works in the exhibition: Letters From the Other Side (2023), diptych wall hanging with content from a propaganda leaflet during the First Indochina War, hand-embroidered on cotton khaki fabric, each 134.6 × 149 × 14 cm; Because No One Living Will Listen / Người Sống Chẳng Ai Nghe (2023), 2-channel video installation, colour, sound, 11'30", Vie/En with En/Ger subs. Produced by James Cohan, New York, The Vega Foundation, and Specter Studios; Our Empty Uniforms Marched To The Echoes Of An Invisible (2020–ongoing), 2-channel video installation, colour, sound, 7'08". Music by Zach Sch with audio courtesy of Lautarchiv der Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. All courtesy of the artist and James Cohan, New York