CONNECT I LIVE: Footscray Community Art Center

And we’re back at Footscray Community Arts Center! This time for a month-long festival as part of CONNECT where RE:SOUNDING will feature in 3 lives performances.

Firstly is the Opening Ceremony where the Dong Son Drum itself will be performed on by 3 percussionists and musicians, Quang Ding, Mia Sjalso and Hamish Upton. Details about attending the opening ceremony for the 22nd of May can be accessed here: https://footscrayarts.com/event/connect/

The following is taken from the FCAC website:

“CONNECT is a site-specific public outdoor art exhibition in two parts curated by Tamsen Hopkinson. Following the first iteration in January to February this year, the second part of CONNECT continues to build on ideas of navigating place, community and public space through contemporary art.

Rafaella McDonald, James Nguyen and Victoria Pham are joined by Hannah Brontë, Nabilah Nordin and Kerrie Poliness in an inventive activation of new work across the outdoor site at Footscray Community Arts Centre. The exhibition spans across performance, painting, sculpture, large-scale participatory field drawing and text based banners; encouraging viewers to celebrate their connection to art, place and each other.”

Image provided by James Nguyen. Pictured are our three musicians, Left to Right: Quang, Mia and Hamish.

SAMSTAG MUSEUM: Winter Program 2021

RE:SOUNDING makes its second physical exhibition installation. This time as part of the Winter 2021 program at the Samstag Museum of Arts (Adelaide). Showcasing our research process, Episodes I and II as well as all our musical performances from Bagus Mazasupa, RCD and Phams’ Bronze Echoes performed by Salina Myat, Adam Cooper-Standbury and Hamish Upton - this exhibition is curated by Gillian Brown.

Information about the exhibition can be accessed here: https://www.unisa.edu.au/connect/samstag-museum/

23 APRIL- 17 JULY: 2021

Image: Provided courtesy of Samstag Museum of Art

WE BOUGHT ANOTHER DRUM

A little bit of exciting news. Earlier in the year, James and Victoria caught wind of another Dong Son Drum being auctioned off and was potentially affordable. As it turns out, we managed to purchase the object (no. 26) from a French Auction House based in Paris. It has finally arrived safely in the hands of Victoria who is currently based in Cambridge, UK and we are so excited for this project to literally expand with the addition of another ancient instrument for us to RE:SOUND.

Keep you eyes and ears peeled for more to come from our second drum…

Image provided by Victoria Pham, 2021.

CONNECT I: Footscray Community Arts Center

For the first installation of FCAC’s CONNECT I series across January and February 2021, RE:SOUNDING makes its first physical exhibition debut. Featuring excerpts from EPISODE I and EPISODE 2 from the RE:SOUNDING project and fragmented casts of the Dong Son Drum artefact itself, CONNECT I explores the fragmentation of the museum collection. Greatest thanks to Tamsen Hopkinson for curating this project as part of the series.

BLEED (Biennial Live Event in the Everyday Digital) 2020

Victoria Pham and James Nguyen are excited to be part of BLEED 2020(Artshouse Melbourne & Campbelltown Arts Centre). With funding from the Australian Council for the Arts, and ArtsNSW, we will present new works and collaborations with Vietnamese band Rắn Cạp Đuôi, Indonesian composer Bagus Mazasupa, Australian percussionists Salina Myat, Adam Cooper-Stanbury, and Hamish Upton. We are also creating experimental interventions with Sheila Pham and Imogen Yang and many other wonderful artists. Click on the BLEED banner to listen and view new music and moving image content.

Access to a Dong Son Bronze Drum

Đông Sơn bronze drum, 40 x 40 x 34 cm. Heger Type 1 Classification, courtesy Private Collector. 

This is the experimental stage of playing with this example and thinking about percussive potentials.

AGNSW SITE VISIT

Sheila Pham and James Nguyen visits the AGNSW to see the two Dong Son drums in their storerooms. We chatted with Matt Cox and Kerry Head around concepts of borders, lived economies, knowledge sharing and knowledge production when working with museums and their public collections. 

Image by Sheila Pham

200 Treasures of The Australian Museum

Described as a Dong Son Bronze Frog Drum, this example was acquired from the Kha Laware Hill People, Laos. The drum was first registered in 1978.

Curiously, the drum was displayed with a few taxidermy examples of "Frogs of the Greater Mekong in Asia." Dr Jodie Rowley and colleagues from the Australian Museum have discovered 20 new Mekong frog species along the Mekong River since 2006. It was a nice juxtaposition of the Bronze Age and the biological sciences. 

A link to The Australian Museum blog: https://australianmuseum.net.au/blogpost/science/our-global-neighbours-frog-drum