Join us for a special artist-led walk-through of Seeing through Stone with Hương Ngô. In addition to speaking about her own work in the exhibition, And The State of Emergency Is Also Always a State of Emergence (2017-ongoing), Ngô will reflect on a selection of other works in the exhibition as they relate to her own installation and practice. Ngô’s walkthrough will touch on themes such as refugee epistemologies and migration, national and personal archives, architecture and confinement, and intergenerational memory.

For the installation And the State of Emergency Is Also Always a State of Emergence, Ngô created a six-by-four-by-eleven-foot bunk bed frame, similar to those found in crowded rooms of jails, detention centers, and prisons across the globe, out of reinforced paper. This precarious architectural sculpture is based on the stories told by Ngô’s siblings about her family’s nearly two-year-long stay, when they were children, in a Hong Kong detention center.

Free and open to the public.

Hương Ngô is an interdisciplinary artist and educator. Her work attends to refugee epistemologies, expanding concepts of time and knowledge to those that are generational, ecological, ruptured, and reconstructed. Often beginning with research in national and personal archives, she realizes her work through installation, works on paper, and performance. Ngô’s artistic practice has been recognized and exhibited at institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York, MCA Chicago, the New Museum in New York, and the Renaissance Society in Chicago, among others. She was awarded the Fulbright U.S. Scholar Grant in Vietnam in 2016 and was featured in the Prague Biennial in 2005 and Prospect.5 Triennial in 2021. Ngô is currently visiting lecturer at University of California Santa Barbara.

Images: (Top Image) Hương Ngô, And The State of Emergency Is Also Always a State of Emergence, 2017-ongoing. Installation view in the Institute of the Arts and Sciences. Photo by Glen Cheriton. (Bottom image) Hương Ngô. Courtesy of the artist. Photo by Leonard Suryajaya.