Heart of Darkness

In her work, spanning installation, video, photography, sculpture and drawing, Thu Van Tran explores issues of colonialism and identity from a historical perspective, and particularly with reference to the colonial relation between Vietnam (her country of origin) and France (where she moved with her family as a refugee in 1981, aged two). Tran, who incorporates histories of violence and exploitation in her practice, deals closely with language and literature. Her works, which draw attention to the duality of language in a colonised culture, inquire into ways of materialising words and writing.

Thu Van Tran’s installation titled "Heart of Darkness" is based on Joseph Conrad’s novella of the same name. The novella presents the testimonies of a young British officer working for a Belgian company up the Congo River, which was one of the main transport routes for the colonisation of Africa. The exotic setting of the novella, the depiction of a pre-civilised, wild nature inhabited by savages, mirror the colonial ideology that was predominant. Conrad, who spoke Polish, French and English, chose to write "Heart of Darkness" in English (the language he was the least familiar with) in order to break the aphasia he experienced back from his journey to Congo due to what he witnessed there. With her installation, Thu Van Tran undertakes a return journey by translating Conrad’s novel from English to French – her own language of exile. She presents her subjective translation on 60 pages that become progressively darker and less legible from one page to the next. This visual change and progressive drift towards darkness not only visualizes/materializes the darkness that is at the core of the book itself but also emphasises, on a broader scale, the role of translation as a political act. Providing a postcolonial reading of Conrad’s novella in order to express her own subjectivity and voice, on the other hand, the artist creates new experiences for memory, pointing to the fact that forgetting is an inherent, constitutive part of remembering.