ALVIN LUONG: Xóm Cải (The Garden Settlement)
Xóm Cải (The Garden Settlement) is an exhibition by Alvin Luong that explores the complex experiences of war, revolution, and ecological crisis as told through the story of the rau muống plant.
With recent, new, and in-progress artworks, Luong traces the significance of the rau muống plant which was once rationed to people as a survival food in the aftermath of the Vietnam War and during the country's communist reunification. The historical significance of the rau muống plant is also interpreted by the artist to speculate about the future of the plant as Climate Change creates more ideal conditions for the plant to grow.
SOPHIA OPPEL: in proximity to all those beautiful objects
Overlooking a shopping plaza foodcourt, Claudia, an AI assistant embodied as a default 3D model, considers the hostility of capitalist affirmation. Her monologue is accompanied by a multi-channel projection on a mirrored terminal, reminiscent of both a surveillance booth and a mall directory map. Claudia ruminates on feminized labour and defered desire as she glitches between generic auto-responses and poetic speculation.
Responding to Collision Studio’s location in the PATH, in proximity to all those beautiful objects combines the aesthetic vernacular of the front-end of a shopping plaza and the back-end of a food court to create an interstitial space and contend with the visceral ramifications of metabolizing capitalist affects.
MILES RUFELDS: Correspondent Missing
Correspondent Missing is a multidisciplinary installation by Miles Rufelds. Originally conceived as a companion piece to a now-lost autofiction film, this installation expands on fragments and themes from the film’s production, continuing the artist’s ongoing research into conspiracy cultures, digital loneliness, and the vertigo of contemporary capitalism.
The film, titled REDFIELD, told the story of a fictional artist’s descent into depression and alienation as they obsessed over a series of anonymous messages they had been receiving, involving cryptic images of chemical laboratories, colourful product demonstrations, and industrial accidents. The film traced the artists’ futile attempts to identify a conspiracy at the centre of the messages, and their fantasy of revealing this conspiracy by exposing it in an art gallery. Two weeks before this exhibition’s opening, the film was lost to water damage.
Reckoning with the film’s absence, Correspondent
Missing transfigures REDFIELD’s narrative psychodrama as a physical environment, reframing the closed cinematic space as a vacant film or theatre set. Laboratory, warehouse, and studio dissolve into an uncanny mise-en-scene, meditating on the conflicted acts of meaning-making, both aesthetic and political.
