Dartmouth Events

Artist scholars Việt Lê and kate-hers RHEE share performance- and lens- based interventions, reconsidering the frames of empire, intimacy, mass media and migration. RHEE and Lê remix the text from White Gaze (an art book collaboration between Michelle Dizon and Lê) and as a performance, an audience call and response, tracing our collective desires and complicities.

 

Transnational interdisciplinary artist kate-hers RHEE (Seoul, Berlin) will present a performance lecture called Throat Sound, exploring Cha’s iconic genre bending novel, Dictee. Like Dictee, Throat Sound highlights the struggle to speak and collages various languages, historical texts and photographs, often without translation to preserve the feeling of Otherness. RHEE collapses several narratives into her own and calls on the audience to speak with her. Making use of Cha’s structural methodology in her evocation of the nine muses, RHEE (re)mixes Greek mythology and recalls the “comfort women,” the Zainichi (Korean Japanese), Asian American immigration, and her own experience with gender based violence, all the while questioning how individual and collective trauma shapes an ethnic and national ethos. After the performance lecture, RHEE will share a recent performance series collaboration developed in Berlin in 2018, that was created as a response to racist and sexist happenings by a popular and spectacle seeking German fashion blogger and party maker, Dandy Diary.

 

Việt Lê (San Francisco, Sài Gòn) presents selections from his art, academic and curatorial projects, all which forge transnational queer popular cultures. Filmed in Hà Nội, Los Angeles, Phnom Penh, and Bangkok, Lê will screen excerpts from three overlapping film projects that trace a time-travelling, trilingual trans-love triangle. lovebang! is an art music video for an original trilingual “hip pop” song in Vietnamese, Khmer, and English. “Hip pop” is a fictitious cross between pop and hip hop. eclipse is a video for spirited lovers, spirits, and the spiritual, filmed in Hà Nội in a ghostly guesthouse and Nhà sàn Đức—a traditional Vietnamese “house on stilts” and pioneering experimental artist-run space. The soundtrack is by controversial, legendary music pioneers Đại Lâm Linh. The heART/break! video project reimagines refugees—from 1970s Southeast Asia and today’s “European refugee crisis”—seeking shelter in a boy bar disco inferno. 

Việt Lê is an artist, writer, and curator. Lê is an Associate Professor in Visual Studies at California College of the Arts.

Born in Seoul, South Korea, kate-hers RHEE was raised in a deeply racially segregated, working class suburb of Detroit, Michigan. Working transculturally in the South Korea, Germany and the United States, RHEE’s work and projects have been shown in diverse galleries and institutions in Berlin and beyond. 

 

Funded in part by Berlin Senate Department for Culture and Europe.