“BuffaloDeer”
James Nguyen
19 Aug → 17 Sept 2016
Let’s sit down and talk. Let’s force a conversation about race. Let’s take turns to record, and face each other. Let’s improvise to see how this plays out.
Let’s also make scarecrows to keep the Buffalo and Deer off our property…
My representations of the migrant experience have increasingly become over-simplified and excruciatingly poetic. This intervention is not just an allegorical fable, or another epic. But by staging a private squabble, maybe there is still a possibility for the Buffalo and Deer to examine the discomfort of their privilege?
James Nguyen's interdisciplinary practice moves between live and online performance, video, drawing and installation. He often makes work in collaboration with family and friends, inviting them to respond to specific sites using readily available materials. Processes of research and conversation play key roles in his practice, which examines strategies of decolonisation, while also interrogating the politics of family history, displacement and diaspora.