“Fragmentation of memory I, II, III”
2019
3 videos, 26 mins per video
The videos document grating the soaps in three locations: the bathroom, the kitchen and the laundry room. These locations are chosen for their familiarity and simplicity in anyone’s life and their closeness to the tasks often performed there by the women. In the artist's childhood memory of the 90’s, her Mother used to sit on a tiny stool washing clothes, cleaning vegetables, preparing foods, washing her children. Everything was carried out with her bare hands and no technology needed.
Xuan Ha performs one task repeatedly through the entire process until she complete twenty six bars of soap which is also the years of her current age. A silent and manual task comes to be very insightful and noisy; one thought after another, multiplied, occupied, untidy in every nerve. From twenty six backwards to zero she scrape her memories into fragments yet again re-created them on their own patchwork. In misery memories are miscoded into un-finished stories in mind. The continuity and the content in a context or a story are incomplete.
written by Xuan Ha
translated by Dang Bui
© 2019 Nguyen Vu Xuan Ha
