Tammy Nguyen Opera Aria To Close Venice Biennale Program

(MENAFN- USA Art News) An aria from artist Tammy Nguyen's debut opera will be featured during the closing program of the 61st Venice Biennale on November 13 and 14, according to an announcement from the Biennale. The piece, titled Timaeus and The Teacher: Foreword, and the broader opera explore themes of nationhood and journeys for freedom.

Nguyen, an associate professor at Wesleyan University in Connecticut, worked with composer Neely Bruce and choreographer Jamal Jackson on the opera, which Wesleyan University commissioned and produced. The artist also has a series of paintings currently displayed in the Biennale's main exhibition.

The opera project emerged from a conversation Nguyen had last summer with curators for the 61st Venice Biennale. She met with them while opening her solo exhibition at Lehmann Maupin's New York gallery to discuss her participation in curator Koyo Kouoh's exhibition In Minor Keys. After Kouoh's death, when Nguyen spoke with the curatorial team that took over, their interest shifted.

“I presented my artist books, but Rory [Tsapayi] saw what I was working on and asked, 'What's with all of these flags?',” Nguyen told The Art Newspaper.“I said, 'Funny you should ask, I've been writing an opera.'”

Flags have long been a subject of Nguyen's work, notably in her 2024-25 Sarasota Art Museum exhibition, Timaeus and the Nations. Her research delves into“flags of convenience,” a practice where ships register under another nation's flag to leverage different labor regulations or tax benefits. Approximately 46 nations, many of them former colonies, allow foreign nationals and vessels to register under their flag. For her Sarasota exhibition, Nguyen created haikus by arbitrarily combining phrases from national anthems of countries participating in these registrations. She then used these hybrid anthems and recombined flag imagery to create new patterns in paintings, deliberately distorting and confusing their original meanings.

“It was from these musical phrases that I wrote a libretto,” Nguyen explained, adding that she used a Fibonacci module to obscure the phrases and frame“the teacher's” story through Plato's Timaeus, a dialogue on the universe's creation.“The teacher sings partly in broken English, but through the logic of the universe, you start to understand what he's saying,” Nguyen stated.

The libretto features The Teacher, portrayed by Brian Vu, a young Vietnamese man who teaches English to Chinese gold traders before attempting to flee Saigon by boat in 1977. This character, loosely inspired by Nguyen's father, joins other travelers seeking freedom but encounters the contradictions of global maritime trade: goods move freely, while people face national restrictions. His journey questions the essence of belonging in a world shaped by political borders and forces beyond human control.

Nguyen recounted her father's experience:“When my dad was at sea as a refugee, he saw a lot of boats that were so overcrowded their engines would break down. This happened to their boat in the South China Sea, which is a very busy conduit for trade and marine traffic, and a Sunoco oil tanker saved their boat. My dad spoke and taught English, so he ended up doing a lot of the communicating, and he found out the captain of the Sunoco ship, which is an American company, was a German Holocaust survivor. The captain helped them because he understood their plight.”

The opera's set includes a circular tapestry, which Nguyen designed, taking inspiration from the cosmological diagram in Plato's Timaeus. Dancers manipulate this tapestry, folding, wrapping, stretching, and compressing it, revealing images that transition between sea, ship, and mountain range while reflecting light. The shifting object and the dancers' movements blur the lines between human and natural forms, emphasizing the performance's core tension: whether nation-state borders can withstand the greater forces of the natural world.

The Venice presentation, an aria from a larger opera, offers an early look at the complete project.“One minute of an opera is an entire operation to produce, so we have a few more years of work ahead,” Nguyen noted.“We have many minutes left to complete, not to mention significant fundraising.” She has been“crystal clear” since childhood about her desire to write an opera, having studied music from an early age in San Francisco.

“I learned about people like John Cage at an early age and was allowed to do things like rip apart pianos and stick erasers inside to compose different music,” Nguyen said.“Today, I'm trying to make a whole world with my art and I realise that studying music is where this began.” The opera has significantly influenced Nguyen's visual art practice.“The opera changed everything,” she affirmed.“I've been thinking more about the audience now in my paintings. Before making the opera, I was trying to create a symphonic space, a holistic world where you can immerse yourself in the image and explore. All of that is still there, but now I want to have a psychological connection with the audience through images that are ordinary to talk about things that are extraordinary.”

Source: The Art Newspaper

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