Duong Thuy Nguyen - Summer 2025 NEW WORK grantee
Duong Thuy Nguyen (b. Vietnam) is an artist and writer working between Hanoi and London. Her interdisciplinary practice engages with memory, displacement, and overlooked histories. Through experimental strategies, she reshapes knowledge production and fosters critical dialogue around colonial legacies, marginalization, and industrialization. Nguyen holds an MA in Fine Art from Central Saint Martins, where she was awarded the Maison/0 This Earth Award and the FRESH TAKE Art Writing 2023 Prize. Her work is also held in the UAL Collection. Recent exhibitions include: New Art Exchange Open 24 (Nottingham), Enigma of Arrival (RCA, London), No Place Like Home (Museum of the Home, London), and The Space Between (TMLightning Gallery, London). She is currently a resident artist at the Museum of the Home as part of the Vietnamese Archives Artist Residency: Library of Ancestral Knowledge.
PROJECT PROPOSAL
Songs for the Unremembered is a moving image project that assembles fragments—sounds, voices, and video—from the Vietnam Center and Sam Johnson Vietnam Archive at Texas Tech University. These are not just materials, but traces: echoes of a war that still hums beneath the surface. The project begins in the archive, but it does not stay there. It moves—through time, through medium, through memory. This work asks: How do we inherit a war we did not live through? How do we hold what was once analog, tactile, lived—and retranslate it in a digital, mediated present? Songs for the Unremembered will recompose archival footage with contemporary sound design, text, and digital interventions. The result will be a short experimental film (15–20 minutes) that unfolds more like a memory than a history—nonlinear, partial, and haunting.
Set to be completed within 12 months, the film will be developed in three stages: (1) research and selection of archival materials (3 months); (2) production and compositional experimentation (5 months); and (3) editing, sound design, and final mastering (4 months). The result will be the Songs for the Unremembered experimental film. But at its core, this project is not about resolution—it is about remaining with what resists closure. It is about honoring both the fixed and the fragile, the documented and the disappeared. Responding to the 2025 theme In Flux, this film dwells in transitional space: between past and present, analog and digital, homeland and diaspora. It explores what happens when historical record becomes artistic medium—when the archive becomes not an endpoint, but a beginning.
-Duong Thuy Nguyen
Summer 2025 REVIEW COMMITTEE
Matthew Lax [2024 NEW WORK focus on Los Angeles grantee] is an artist-filmmaker and writer working between New York and Los Angeles. Lax’s screenings and exhibitions include Viennale (Austria), IHME Contemporary (Helsinki), Rencontres Internationales (Paris/Berlin), MIX New York, table (Chicago), Human Resources (Los Angeles), Los Angeles Contemporary Archive (LACA), and Winnipeg Underground Film Festival, among others. His writing has appeared in BOMB, Millennium Film Journal, Los Angeles Review of Books, and Texte Zur Kunst. In 2025, he was the subject of a survey presentation at the 54th International Film Festival Rotterdam.
Andre Keichian [2024 NEW WORK focus on Los Angeles grantee] is an interdisciplinary artist and educator working across photography, video and sculpture. Keichian’s work addresses the complexities and contingencies of what we call identity and how we can metaphorically represent diasporic community. His work has shown both nationally and internationally at spaces such as the Metropolitan Cultural Center (Ecuador), The Craft Contemporary Museum (Los Angeles), Zuckerman Museum of Art (Georgia), El Centro Cultural Ricardo Rojas (Buenos Aires), Museum of Contemporary Art Atlanta, and Anthology Film Archives (New York), among others. Keichian has completed various fellowships and residencies, including The Echo Park Film Center, The Camera Obscura and WonderRoot. Keichian completed his MFA in the Photography & Media Program at the California Institute of the Arts. He lives and works in Los Angeles.
Inbar Hagai [2024 NEW WORK grantee] is a queer interdisciplinary artist, filmmaker, and film programmer, whose work spans video, virtual reality, sculpture, installation, and experimental documentary filmmaking. Hagai gained her BFA with honors from Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design and her MFA from Carnegie Mellon University. Hagai’s films and media installations have been exhibited internationally in notable art venues and festivals. Most recently, she was selected as artist in residence at the NARS Foundation in Brooklyn, NY, and the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture.
Julianna Heller [2025 Curatorial research fellow] is a curator and writer whose work centers on experimental exhibitions, interdisciplinary research, and artist-driven public programs. She holds an MA in Curatorial Practice from California College of the Arts and a BA in Art History from Emory University. She has organized exhibitions at the Wattis Institute, Diego Rivera Gallery, and Root Division, and has worked with Bay Area art organizations including FOR-SITE, Saint Joseph’s Arts Society, Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture, and 500 Capp Street. Julianna’s practice is grounded in a commitment to community, collaboration, and the politics of space..