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The Propeller Group

Biography

The Propeller Group - Artists - James Cohan

The Propeller Group is an artist collective based in Ho Chi Minh City. Founded in 2006, The Propeller Group's multimedia works use the languages of advertising and politics to initiate conversations about power, propaganda and public perception.


TPG became well-known for their 2011 advertising parody Television Commercial For Communism, included in the New Museum’s Ungovernables 2012 Triennial exhibition. The work considers the contradictions and tensions between two disparate eco-political systems. For the work, TPG hired a global advertising firm to create an advertising campaign to market Communist ideology through capitalist means. 

 

The group’s 2014 film The Living Need Light, The Dead Need Music, created for Prospect. 3 New Orleans Biennial, is a poetic voyage through the funeral traditions of South Vietnam and engages the striking similarity between these rituals and those from around the rest of the Global south, especially New Orleans. The film combines documentary footage of actual funeral processions along with vivid re-enactments; the film is a poetic rumination on death and the ways in which the living honor the dead.

 

“In many of our projects, we try to create disorder, hoping that disorder in such particular instances can become another sense of order to an audience that may be all too afraid of change or unable to accept other possible ways of engaging with current social structures. We like to play. We align ourselves with different cultural producers. We like to let ourselves get ingested into the bellies of big social beasts such as television, advertising, or the various manifestations of pop-culture.” –The Propeller Group

 

The Propeller Group's first survey exhibition opened at the MCA Chicago in 2016, and travelled to the Blaffer Art Museum, Houston, TX, the Phoneix Art Museum, AZ, and the San Jose Musuem of Art, CA. The exhibition was accompanied by a catalogue. TPG's work has been featured in the 56th Venice Biennale, Italy (2015) and has been the subject of further solo exhibitions at the Luckman Gallery at California State University, Los Angeles, CA (2019); Minneapolis Institute of Art, MI (2017); Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis, MO (2015); and the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA (2015). Past group exhibitions and international biennials for TPG include: Islands, Constellations, and Galapagos, Yokohama Trienniale, Japan (2017); After Darkness: Southeast Asian Art in the Wake of History, Asia Society, New York, NY (2017); Prospect.3: Notes for Now, New Orleans, LA (2014); Residual: Disrupted Choreographies, Carre d’Art, France (2014); No Country: Contemporary Art for South and Southeast Asia, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, NY (2013); 7th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, Queensland Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane, Australia; The Unseen, Guangzhou Triennial, Guangdong Museum of Art, China; Six Lines Of Flight, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA; Made In LA, Los Angeles Biennial, Hammer Museum, CA; The Ungovernables, New Museum, NY (2012); Project 35, Independent Curators International, Pratt Manhattan Gallery, NY; (2011); Projects 93, Museum of Modern Art, NY; 8th Shanghai Biennale, in collaboration with Superflex, China (2010); What’s the Big Idea?, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, CA (2009); The Farmers & the Helicopters, Freer & Sackler, Smithsonian, Washington DC, (2008); and the Lyon Biennial, The History of a Decade That Has Not Yet Been Named, France (2007).

 

TPG’s work is included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA; New Orleans Museum of Art, LA; Speed Museum, Louisville, KY; Centre Pompidou, Paris, France; Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia; Queensland Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane, Australia; Burger Collection, Hong Kong; and the Singapore Art Museum.

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The Propeller Group is an artist collective based in Ho Chi Minh City. Founded in 2006, The Propeller Group's multimedia works use the languages of advertising and politics to initiate conversations about power, propaganda and public perception.

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