Thu Van Tran, Fahrenheit 451

View of the exhibition Thu Van Tran exhibition "Fahrenheit 451", Bétonsalon - Center for Art and Research, Paris, 2009

HOMME LIVRE - HOMME LIBRE
A solo show by Thu Van Tran, including collaborations with Chi Waï Ng and Didier Rittener

The project is to adapt the suspense novel, Fahrenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury (1953), into an exhibition. This is an endeavor to re-transcribe the narrative into experience and to explore its principle concerns. In a future society where it is forbidden to read, where books are burnt once they are discovered, people who want to save them learn them by heart. To take this as fact, the confrontation between censorship and resistance, the incarnation of a visionary aesthetic and the use of language as a weapon, will be materialised within the works proposed in this exhibition.

To hide a book and to memorize its contents when there are no other possible formats; to keep the words as a form of survival and to use their transmittal to found a future collective – these are the almost hopeless themes of Fahrenheit 451. The adaptation is motivated by this dramatic subject with its heroic dimension whose political content holds a prophecy of a world without freedom or free will, and which directly evokes certain historic events, wars and book burnings.

View of the Thu Van Tran exhibition "Fahrenheit 451" with Thu Van Tran, Germination, 2009. Bétonsalon - Center for Art and Research, Paris, 2009.

This interest in science fiction for Thu Van Tran is particular to this adaptation. Her attention is focused on the principal characteristic of the genre: anticipation. It reconstructs the experience of our present as already past. This process demands us to understand our present as the history of things still to come, being told to us. In this way, aware of the links to fact, the artist will attempt to invest the space of the exhibition with notions of duration and origin by lending it a format wherein these ideas can take form.

For this project the artist has invited the intervention of a graphic designer originally from Hong Kong, Chi Waï Ng. Trusting in him the materialization of a visual and narrative identity. Swiss Artist Didier Rittener has been engaged to collaborate around the question of book burning. During the exhibition there will be a program of performances and debates conducted around the theme of the power of language.

The exhibition will start with a phonetic prelude and will evolve over the seven following chapters: CH 1-Existing hidden, CH 2-Book burning, CH 3-The dandelion or the destructive bloodhound?, CH 4-Immediate happiness, CH 5 -Germination, CH 6-The imagination won’t give in, CH 7-The escape.