Artists H. Lan Thao Lam and Lana Lin will speak on "Unidentified Vietnam: Boundaries/Migrations/Identities" Oct. 23 at 7:30 p.m. in Syracuse University's Maxwell Auditorium. The lecture, part of Syracuse Symposium 2003: "Journeys," is free and open to the public.
Lam and Lin have collaborated on a project, "Unidentified Vietnam," that is centered on a large archive of films salvaged from the former South Vietnamese Embassy in Washington, D.C. They will discuss the propaganda films in the collection and speak to the questions of how nations identify themselves and are identified by others in this era of globalization.
They will also address the role that the archive serves as an ongoing negotiation of information-structured by the global landscape while structuring our understanding of history.
Lam is an interdisciplinary artist/writer who has lived in Vietnam, Malaysia and Canada. Her current body of work involves investigative inquiries and analysis, language, installation and object making to explore the discrepancy between lived experience and its representation. Her projects aim to destabilize the notion of master narratives by bringing the viewer to question the construction of the past, its meaning and its historical legacies. Lam's work has been exhibited and distributed worldwide, and she is currently a fellow at the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program.
Lin is a New York-based artist whose work engages with the ways experience is shaped by cultural contexts and the possibility/Impossibility of translating that experience through representation. Her films and videos have been shown at the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art, both in New York City; the China Taipei Film Archive, the Festival de Femmes in Creteil, France, and the London Film Festival. Lin is an assistant professor in the media and communication arts department at the City College of New York.
The Syracuse Symposium, presented for the University by The College of Arts and Sciences, is an annual intellectual festival celebrating interdisciplinary thinking, imagining and creating. The 2003 theme is "Journeys"; journeys of exploration and discovery, intellectual journeys, mythical and artistic journeys, migrations of peoples, exiles, liberations, pilgrimages and more. The series includes lectures, exhibits, performances and other special events.
