OLIVIER LAUDE
Chiến Thắng Ba Tơ
Solo exhibition of new photographs by Olivier Laude
Exhibition Dates:
September 9 - October 28, 2022
Opening Reception:
Friday, September 9, 2022, 5:00-9:00pm
Artist Talk:
Saturday, October 8 @ 11:00am
On view at Rivalry Projects, Olivier Laude: Chiến Thắng Ba Tơ is an exhibition of large-scale color photographs and sculptural objects produced in Vietnam. Of concern within these works is the artist’s ongoing investigation into how cultural identities are constructed, portrayed, and flattened, while his densely descriptive photographs transport us to a world both familiar and completely unknown. This exhibition is on view September 9-October 28, 2022 with an Opening Reception on Friday, September 9, 2022 from 5:00-9:00pm.
The exhibition’s title, Chiến Thắng Ba Tơ, is drawn from one of the artist’s earliest photographs in the series, and also functions as an important entry point for decoding Laude’s work. Chiến Thắng translates to “victory” in Vietnamese, while Ba Tơ refers to a Vietnamese village that has been lost to time, likely due to the renaming of villages after the end of the Vietnam War. While the village of Ba Tơ once existed, the artist uses this lost village as a fictive landscape and an organizing point to ground the work within Vietnam, while dually disassociating his images from any perceived documentary function.
While Laude’s images appear to have been photographed in a realistic manner, everything about them has been meticulously conceived, crafted and constructed. In spite of their appearance, these are not documentary images and don’t reflect the lives or daily activities of people living in Vietnam. Populated with figures from Vietnam, Laude’s images present as ethnographic portraits, while their construction mirrors the visual language of editorial photography. The artist’s work could best be described as artificial photography; occupying a space emphasized by the presence of the camera.
Chiến Thắng Ba Tơ challenges Western perceptions of cultural identity and visual acumen through a world grounded in our own, yet drawn in mimicry from the artist’s own lived experience and professional capacity as a cultural chameleon.
