One Day We’ll Go Home
2023 | One Day We’ll Go Home provides a critique of established historical narratives of the wars in Vietnam, colonialism, dislocation, and their long-lasting aftermath.
One Day We’ll Go Home: Featuring Tiffany Chung, Brandon Tho Harris,
Tuan Andrew Nguyen, Patricia Nguyen, and Julian Saporiti
November 1 - December 16, 2023
This exhibition wonders about the possibility of home, of the movement to and from and towards home, a return home, a homegoing or homecoming. The notion of home is fluid but also rendered complex when home is tied to homeland, to the nation, to a country. What happens when the home/land where you came from is no longer there? What happens when home/land is not where you were born but where your family is from?
One Day We’ll Go Home gathers Vietnamese American artists who depart from and arrive at the home and homeland as nuoc—water, nation, country, homeland—always in flux, moving with the ebbs and flows, connected between past and present, intertwined across the globe and the diaspora. Drawing from family histories and personal engagements, they work within and expand from the frameworks of war, refugee displacement and resettlement.
The artists begin with personal histories, family pictures, and heirlooms and work from archival photographs, historical documents, and data; they add to, supplement, transform them to return and arrive at a storytelling that remembers and mourns. The choice of medium—video and installation—visualizes, makes heard the different ways of moving through nuoc, calls from the depths those lost from war and the refugee movement.
The exhibition is curated by Dr. Leonie Bradbury with accompanying exhibition wall texts by Dr. Catherine H. Nguyen, Assistant Professor of Asian Diasporic Literatures.
Supported by the Department of Writing, Literature & Publishing, Emerson College School of the Arts, and the Harvard University Asia Center.