Cô Gái Màu Đỏ
Video, Sound and poetry work by Victoria Pham
Installed as part of ZAO TANG Gallery Pop-up, Nottinghill London, October 15-30 2021.
Curated and Commissioned by STIGMA Room and Its Local Collection, supported by Arts Council England and MALIN & GOETZ.
This work has since been shown at the Powerhouse Museum of Applied Arts and Science (2022)
and has been shortlisted as part of the Wyndham Art Prize.
There are two versions of the work: one designed for the architectural installation of ZAO TANG 2021, and a full-screen film version used for the Powerhouse Museum in 2022.
Cô Gái Màu Đỏ is a spoken work, film and sound work. The poetry comprises of a variety of text composed by myself with quotations from the French National Anthem and an entire excerpt from classical (and female) Vietnamese poet, Hồ Xuân Hương. I chose to express the poetic narration in three languages as they represent the three languages that reflect meI selected Hồ Xuân Hương’s poetry, specifically her work The Incredible Grotto, due to her position of beloved reverence in Vietnamese culture and that her work expresses a surprisingly intimate insight into her experience as an Asian women – with her poetry being candid in its representation of female eroticism. Cô Gái Màu Đỏ is a film about the voices, in particular it is the voice of the women in my family and my own, internal and external, real and imagined. Combined, they are the voices that tell us stories. Through the intertwined connections of redness, blood, river, pigments, blush that reflect myself – family, kinship, memory, ecological motion, passion, grief and luck. Perhaps the most intimate and personal work from my entire portfolio, Cô Gái Màu Đỏ is ultimately a video and sound portrait about myself.
STILLS from film by Victoria Pham
IMAGES from ZAO TANG exhibition for Wall Paper Magazine by Tarin Wilkhu
