Still from Tuan Andrew Nguyen's The Unburied Sounds of a Troubled Horizon, 2022.
A Spell Against Amnesia delves into the concepts of history and memory through films that honor painful pasts, transforming them into tools for healing and resistance. The series features Tuan Andrew Nguyen's The Unburied Sounds of a Troubled Horizon, 2022, which will screen on Saturday, August 31 from 2-5 PM at the Carnegie Museum of Art's Art Theater.
Notes from guest film programmer, Astria Suparak:
"Like a phoenix rising from ashes and a lotus blooming from mud, beauty can be born of anguish and destruction. Living after loss can feel like life hollowed out. History is never past, the repercussions of war are felt decades after the fight’s official end, and memories linger. These videos model ways to honor ourselves and our ancestors, and to transform weapons into nourishment. Utopia doesn’t have to be removed of sadness; we heal with scars, our past trauma informs our future decisions, and we can warn those behind us. We birth our new selves. To many happy returns."
Tuan Andrew Nguyen graduated from the Fine Arts program at the University of California, Irvine in 1999 and received his Masters of Fine Arts from The California Institute of the Arts in 2004. He currently lives and works in Ho Chi Minh City, where he is a co-founder and former board member of Sàn Art. Nguyen was a founding member of The Propeller Group in 2006, an entity that positions itself between a fake advertising company and an art collective. Accolades for the group include the main prize at the 2015 Internationale Kurzfilmtage Winterthur and a Creative Capital award among others.