Westminster Lecturer Dr George Clark exhibits work at new exhibition celebrating the British-Vietnamese community

The exhibition, which runs from 4 November to 16 December 2023 at LUX at Waterlow Park Centre in North London, features work by Dr George Clark together with new commissioned artworks for the exhibition by Nhà Sàn Collective, Moi Tran and Lưu Chữ, as well as broadcast commissions by Cường Minh Bá Phạm, Trà My Hickin, Stefan Khánh Nielsen, Thierry Phung, Nic Annette Miller and Koa Pham.

The works in the Well Settled exhibition explore questions of cultural heritage, archival care and inter-local exchange with a focus on the newly constituted An Việt Archives, the largest known British-Vietnamese community archive in the UK.  

Dr Clark is a member of the An Việt Archives steering committee. He was also the artistic coordinator of the year-long initiative Well Settled: Activating the An Việt Archives, which commissioned these artist projects and activities.  

Well Settled includes Clark’s new film The Scattered Body or A World Unclouded by Dust. This two-screen film explores the collective labour of archives connected to the dispersed history of Vietnam and proposes the archive as a living entity. The film is the culmination of his long-term collaborative project initiated in 2021 titled Handle with Care, which explored experimental ways of working with artists and archives through an artist residency programme and workshops. 

Dr Clark said: “The Scattered Body or A World Unclouded by Dust is a new two channel installation work developed with contributions from many artists and in response to two distinct collections: one in Hackney and one in Hanoi. The film takes inspiration from a short story by the Vietnamese writer and filmmaker Đoàn Lê called The Cemetery of Chua Village which is told from the perspective of the dead buried in the cemetery as they await a new arrival. Drawing on this perspective shift, my work seeks to locate itself away from what can be extracted from an archive to focus instead on how ‘dead’ archival objects themselves exist in the world and what might constitute their dreams, memories or desires.” 

Well Settled is supported by the British Council, Hackney Archives, LUX, An Việt Archives, and the Centre for Research and Education in Arts and Media (CREAM) at the University of Westminster. The exhibition is part of a larger project to develop new tools for accessing, activating and sharing the collection of the An Việt Archives. 

Learn more about Film and Television courses at the University of Westminster.