Bien Biet Bay Bayperformance/video installation'Floating afar'
2025
Single-channel video
color
sound
00:03:48 'Floating afar' – the video artwork of an eponymous performance by Dang Thuy Anh – encompasses the artist’s thoughts on the self, originality, the body, and the transformative potential of a performance when conducted in different contexts. Inspired by a performance by Tuan Mami entitled 'Protest against the void' (2015), 'Floating afar' plays homage and responds to Tuan Mami’s work, creating frictions and oppositions between the original and the appropriated, or rather between entities that always exist in parallel. In 'Floating afar', instead of images of “the ripped muscles of a faceless male body,... the helpless throws drenched in sweat and mixed with chilli powder”(1), a hypothetical question is posed: if the resisting body was female, and if that female body was Thuy Anh’s, then that act of resistance is directed towards what? Rather than chilli powder, the woman’s fist powerfully throws up handfuls of milk powder. That sweet, white, nutritious powder flies in the air and clings to the audience on its descent. Mixed with the artist’s sweat, it creates a sweet yet bitter milk, “clinging to me, sticking to my head, my face, my hair, my body, my breasts”(2). In the work, protest is no longer an outward act of resistance, and instead transforms as a journey to the very edges of what constitutes the inner self. Between conception and abandonment, creation and separation, dream and reality, happiness and suffering, the female character becomes crystallised through the looping film footage.
(1) (2) Quoted from Dang Thuy Anh’s artist statement


In permanent collection at Nguyen Art Foundation