Tuan Andrew Nguyen’s video, The Spectre of the Ancestors Becoming (2019), is replete with moments when one feels a kick to the gut and a sense of sickness at the enduring violence and corrosiveness of colonialism and extractive capitalism. During an imagined scene enacted between Ibra, a Tirailleurs Sénégalais (Senegalese infantrymen who fought in the French army during both world wars and in wars of colonial suppression in Algeria, Vietnam, Laos among others) and his Vietnamese wife, Nguyễn Thi, there is a discussion about his wish to return to Africa with their children — she does not want to leave. “I’m French only when they need bodies for bullets,” the soldier laments of a role that has been conveniently erased by Eurocentric historiography.
Later, the son Ibra leaves Vietnam with confronts his father about not responding to his mother’s letters and “amputating a part of my life”. The son feels an outsider in Dakar with his bi-racial features and a sense of being incomplete because of a colonial tension which has led to his family breaking up. An intimate, messy colonial legacy that will remain through him, his newborn baby and then the next generation. The Spectre of the Ancestors Becoming is one of three video installations in Nguyen’s The Other Side of Now, an exhibition which runs at the Zeitz MOCAA in Cape Town, South Africa until 20 July 2025.
Another protagonist (a modern-day descendent of a Vietnamese woman and a Tirailleurs Sénégalais) from another story arc in this series of vignettes which form the installation, holds up a portrait of her grandmother; the French-made car in the background confirms colonialism’s economic resilience and entrenched residual power. Comprising filmed and audio-recorded enactments of imagined or real scenes between parents, grandparents and offspring, and intimate archival photographs (from Vietnamese-Senegalese families in Senegal which includes family archives and military/ news ones) The Spectre of the Ancestors Becoming is powerful and poetic in its stated aim to “untangle” complex histories and complicated intimacies of Vietnamese and Senegalese solidarity. Different narrative elements are screened simultaneously across the four screens creating an apt sense of disorientation.
Set in contemporary Vietnam, most of the protagonist Habiba’s reflections occur around the Moroccan Gate, a monument in Hanoi’s Ba Vì district built by Moroccan defectors from the French army. The gate serves as a portal between Vietnam and Morocco, between the worlds of the living and the dead, and is also the focus of a speculative segment at the end of the film which warns of the contemporary environmental catastrophe humanity faces. The dual-screen emphasises the notion of two worlds and two perspectives, of identity unsettled — a double consciousness echo of WEB DuBois.
Habiba reads a letter to her father, written because “no one living will listen”. It details her outlier status in both Vietnam and Morocco (where she attempted to settle for a while) and an exploration of her own identity—with its perceived missing parts—through trying to discover who her father was. “It’s been 60 years and I still don’t have a place to call home,” she says, mourning a constant search for roots. This is an intimate familial desire for ancestral connection but meeting, often, only residual colonial violence.In the room adjacent are accompanying works, Contact (02) (2024), a sculptural replica of the handmade sign on the Moroccan Gate, and Letters from the Other Side (2024). Letters from the Other Side consists of two embroidered tapestries which replicate the propaganda pamphlets the Việt Minh independence movement distributed to Tirailleurs during the First Indochina War to convince them to defect. Several hundred of the approximately 1,40,000 soldiers either surrendered or did defect according to recent news reports.
One of the most powerful pieces in the exhibition is Solidarities Between the Reincarnated (2019), a collection of family archive photographs presented in frames on furniture for display. It is a poignant reminder that stories of families—however, and wherever in the world they may be constituted—are universal ones. Contemporary resonance is also loud in The Unburied Sounds of a Troubled Horizon (2022), the longest of Nguyen’s video installations — and his most filmic in terms of narrative, scripting and cinematography. The aesthetics cause the piece to move between Korean melodrama and hard-hitting documentary as it follows the protagonist Nguyễt, who works in the family scrapyard in Quảng Trị, a demilitarised zone that split Vietnam between the north and south.
Nguyệt believes she is the reincarnation of the sculptor Alexander Calder, has an extremely needy mother and collects scrap, including the shells of bombs from the Vietnam War involving the United States. Her cousin Lai has lost fingers, an arm, legs, his sight and two other cousins while exploring a land-mine and teaches children to avoid ending up like him — or worse.
As 2000-pound bombs rain over Gaza and now Lebanon, Nguyen’s exploration of the lasting effects of war and its associated traumas are inescapable in 2024. Over 41,000 are reported dead in Gaza – families erased, communities destroyed. Children are trapped and slowly dying under the rubble of devastated buildings, while others walk past every day searching for food or medical assistance, unable to respond to those pleas. These are new acts of violence that Nguyen’s work demands we confront in the present — and repeat Lenin’s nagging question: What is to be done? Today, and for generations to come.
Nguyễn’s work acknowledges the intergenerational nature of violence. It attempts to repair through the process of turning haunting into healing. This is most evident in how some of the bombshell casings gathered in the film have been remade as five Singing Bowls (2022): the audience is invited to play with these bowls set at different frequencies for different types of healing.
The Other Side of Now successfully disentangles and highlights these messy, obscured and erased colonial histories through collaboration with communities and a subsequent reflection on the intimate and familial. In doing so, the exhibition also connects a city and a country with a violently racist past to a present where colonial and apartheid traumas still flourish unresolved. Where state violence, like the police massacre of 34 striking mineworkers in Marikana, South Africa, in 2012 perpetrated and perpetuates the madnesses of previous regimes. It also connects South Africa to a world almost overwhelmed by environmental, political and economic conflicts — all of which have their roots in the colonial, extractivist past.