Nguyen Trinh Thi’s practice is a personal and poetic layering of hidden histories and current events that deftly speak to issues of censorship through the perspective of the documentarian, the artist, the collective.

Letters from Panduranga is an essay film portraying a Cham community living in Ninh Thuan, Vietnam, under circumstances that threaten their very existence. Known as Panduranga, it is the last surviving territory of the ancient matriarchal kingdom of Champa. The Vietnamese government is to build the country’s first two nuclear power plants in Ninh Thuan by 2020. Public discussions regarding the project have been largely absent in Vietnam due to strict government controls over public speech and media. 

Through a network of Cham scholars, the artist spent a number of residency periods in Ninh Thuan. Challenged with questions of accessibility, of representation, and of speaking on behalf of the other, Nguyen says, “As artists, we have contradictory desires: to be engaged, but also to disappear.” Nguyen’s portraits, landscapes, and voices in Letters from Panduranga offer layered and incisive reflections around fieldwork, ethnography, ongoing colonialisms, and the role of the artist.

Nguyen Trinh Thi was born in 1973 in Hanoi, where she lives and works today. She studied journalism and photography at the University of Iowa, and International Relations and Ethnographic Film at the University of California, San Diego. She is the founding and acting director of Hanoi Doclab, a center founded in 2009 for documentary filmmaking and video art in Hanoi. In 2015–2016, Nguyen is a resident at DAAD, Berlin.

Select recent exhibitions include Lyon Biennale, France (2015); Asian Art Biennial, Taipei, Taiwan (2015); Finalist Exhibition, APBF Signature Art Prize, Singapore Art Museum (2014); 5th Fukuoka Triennale, Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, Japan (2014); “If The World Changed,” 4th Singapore Biennale (2013); 15th Jakarta Biennale, Indonesia (2013); “Collecting Counter-Memories,” San Art, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam (2013); “Move on Asia: Video Art in Asia 2002 to 2012,” ZKM, Karlsruhe, Germany (2013); “Women in Between: Asian Women Artists 1984–2012,” Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, Okinawa Prefecture Art Museum, Japan (2012); and DMZ International Documentary Film Festival, Korea (2011).