Exhibition «Heirloom»

   More than two months to move slowly through a history many Vietnamese families still carry in their bodies. The first solo exhibition by artist Dương Thúy Nguyên in Ho Chi Minh City works across sculpture, moving image and installation, around what remains long after a war has formally ended.

   Its subject is the enduring afterlife of Agent Orange, known in Vietnam as chất độc màu da cam. Newly commissioned works sit alongside military maps, declassified documents, archival film and oral histories. The artist does not treat the archive as a historical record to be illustrated, but as a material to be worked through: fragments, absences and physical traces are placed next to one another to ask how memory is inherited, transformed and carried across generations.

   At the centre of the space is «Songs for the Unremembered», a commissioned moving-image work imagining the journey of the defoliant from its manufacture and transport in striped barrels, through its dispersal across Vietnam's forests, to its continuing presence in ecological and human systems. It blends documentary research with speculative storytelling and keeps asking how histories get remembered, forgotten and retold.

   The groundwork behind it:

• — research carried out at the Sam Johnson Vietnam Archive at Texas Tech University
• — an interdisciplinary practice combining archival research with sculptural process
• — the artist was born in Hà Nội and works on environmental change, cultural memory and material transformation

   It is for viewers who follow contemporary art, the history of the war and its environmental aftermath, and for anyone who wants a room quiet enough to think in. This is not a ten-minute exhibition, so give yourself an afternoon.

   The run is long, which means you can come back a second time and notice what you walked past without registering the first.