Dinh Q. Le. The thread of memory and other photographs

From Tuesday February 08, 2022 to Sunday November 20, 2022 at the Quai Branly-Jacques Chirac museum.

Vietnamese artist Dinh Q. Lê has built a rich and complex body of work since the 1990s, using various techniques in which photography plays an important role. However, Dinh Q. Lê is not a photographer. The image is for him a material to question, to cut out, to transform.

About the exhibition

Dinh Q. Lê designs installations using vernacular photographs and produces hybrid images by mixing various registers of photographs. He uses a technique of weaving images inspired by the gestures of his aunt weaving rugs.

Weaving images in turn, Dinh Q. Lê associates two registers of representation and produces a new image, which is a combination of the first two, whose vision he irremediably disturbs.

Speech plays an important role in the concerns of the artist. Making it possible, audible, and restoring the complexity of History by those who have lived it, is a recurring line in his work. If several of his works aim to offer other images and stories of Vietnam (Light and Belief), others have, for several years, contributed to questioning the history of Cambodia and the representation of the genocide carried out by the Khmer Rouge regime. Series Splendor and Darkness mixes thus by the weaving of the portraits of victims with the bas-reliefs of Angkor Vat. More recent works (Adrift in Darkness) use images of migrants and evoke the tragedies of crossing the Mediterranean