Exposição - An-My Lê, Between Two Rivers/Giữa hai giòng sông/Entre deux rivières, MoMA, NY, Through Mar 16, 2024

An-My Lê. đô-mi-nô (detail). 2021 Vintage novelty lighters and cotton yarn, each 6 1/2 × 4 1/4 × 1 1/2" (16.5 × 10.8 × 3.8 cm), installation dimensions variable. © 2023 An-My Lê.

As Saigon was “falling,” captured by armed Communist forces in April 1975—an attack known to the North Vietnamese as the Liberation of Saigon and to the anticommunist Vietnamese as Black April—15-year-old An-My Lê was lifted out of the city on a cargo plane that took her to Camp Pendleton, in California, via United States Air Force bases in the Philippines, Wake Island, and Guam. It was a decisive moment in history, one that would later inflect Lê’s art.

For the past 30 years, the conflicting ideals of American politics, as informed by her Vietnamese heritage and her experience of war and dislocation, have been at the center of Lê’s creative practice. Her photographs, films, textiles, and sculptural installations powerfully explore the complex fictions called upon to represent, legitimize, and mythologize warfare. Lê does not take a conventional photojournalistic approach to real-time combat; rather, with poetic attention to politics and landscape, she focuses on military exercises (“pre-enactments” of future combat) and war reenactments (wistful restagings of past conflicts), and on how these simulations collapse the distance between past and present actions and perpetuate a mental state of war—what she calls the “Vietnam of the mind.”1 “I’m more interested in the precursor to war and its psychic aftermath,” Lê observed in 2005. “There is something about addressing the preparation for war or memory of war itself that allows one to think about the larger issues of war and devastation.”

An-My LêBetween Two Rivers/Giữa hai giòng sông/Entre deux rivières

MoMA, NY, Through Mar 16, 2024