BERLIN.- Esther Schipper Berlin is presenting Fire Sermon, Tuan Andrew Nguyen's first solo exhibition with the gallery. On view are five new sculptures from the artist's series of mobiles.
Tuan Andrew Nguyen's practice explores the critical impact of storytelling across media including video, sculpture, and installation. Grounded in sustained community engagement and extensive research, his work engages with oral narration, material history, genealogies that span continents, and the lingering impact of colonial politics. Nguyen's cinematic works feature tales of biographical, geographical and temporal entanglements that meld fact and fiction. The artist’s sculptural works are intertwined with his cinematic oeuvre.
The five mobiles on view in Fire Sermon are made from artillery shells salvaged in Vietnam. They take direct inspiration from Nguyen’s 2022 film The Unburied Sounds of a Troubled Horizon, in which a young metal scavenger is ostracized by her mother, who believes that her daughter is possessed because of her strange obsession with making kinetic sculpture out of bomb material. In the film, which is fictional but interweaves true stories from people affected by UXO (Unexploded Ordnance), it becomes clear the character’s biographical and historical context evokes specific associations: “Aren't they like the bombings you used to tell me about?” she asks her mother. This story sets her on a journey to turn bombs into bells of healing power.
Nguyen’s mobiles play on the viewer's familiarity with Calder’s work to draw us in, then allow us to experience their alienness: At first impression similar—colorful abstract elements, animated by slight movements as they balance gracefully—the centrally positioned artillery shell casings make their otherness immediately clear. The object’s material history carriers a legagy of trauma that reanimates the past and assumes a new life. Nguyen’s use of Calder’s playful visual language also points to the limits of form as an autonomous means of communication. As a leading figure of modernism, Calder’s work came to be associated with US Cold War values and the political neutrality attributed to postwar modernism. Yet, Calder was in fact an active opponent of the Vietnam War, producing anti-war materials and in 1977 turning down the US Presidential Medal of Freedom in protest.
For Nguyen then the notion of repurposing materials from the Vietnam War has wider meanings, both historical and spiritual. Unexploded ordnance from the extensive US bombing campaign, which dropped millions of tonnes of munitions on Vietnam during the war, remains embedded across the country, endangering communities and restricting the safe use of land. Drawing on the tradition of repurposing UXOs in Vietnam into objects for daily use, his transformation into art works is an act of remembrance and healing. Nguyen's practice builds on, as he put it, "the power to take something that was meant for destruction, harm, and change it to something that has the possibility to heal.” The artist takes this idea literally, as the central artillery shell casings of each work function as bells, tuned to a frequency associated with healing qualities.
The exhibition’s title, Fire Sermon, refers to the Buddhist Ādittapariyāya Sutta, which describes sensory experience as “burning” with passion, aversion, delusion, and suffering. Liberation is attained through detachment or non-attachment.
