Dinh Q. Lê
Dinh Q. Lê, Infirmary on Chincha Norte Island. Production shot of The Colony, 2016. Photo courtesy of Artangel and the artist.
Dinh Q. Lê was born in Hà Tiên in then South Vietnam in 1968. In the late 1970s, his family escaped by boat before eventually settling in the US where he completed his education.
He is the co-founder of Sàn Art in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, where he has been based for the past decade. In 2010 he was awarded the Prince Claus Award for his outstanding contribution to cultural exchange. Lê’s work has been included in many international group shows including Documenta 13 in Kassel, Germany (2012), the 2nd Singapore Biennale (2008), the Gwangju Biennial (2006) and the Venice Biennale (2003).
He was the first Vietnamese artist to have a solo show at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2010). A major survey exhibition, Dinh Q. Lê: Memory for Tomorrow, was presented at the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo in 2015.
The Colony is a video installation filmed on the Chincha Islands off the coast of Peru. Home to huge colonies of birds, by the mid 19th century the islands had become mountains of guano. Discovered to be a potent fertiliser, guano quickly became a valuable natural resource. British merchants controlled the trade, using bonded Chinese labourers to harvest under unforgiving conditions. Meanwhile Spanish and Peruvian forces scrambled for control of the islands and war broke out. In 1856 the United States Congress passed the Guano Act enabling it to seize islands around the world. This geo-political conflict was abruptly halted once chemical fertilisers were developed at the start of the twentieth century and the trade of guano collapsed. The islands were recolonised by the birds.
For The Colony, Dinh has filmed the islands from a number of different perspectives, a boat circles the land while drones give a bird’s eye view.
The islands have not been permanently inhabited for more than a century, but labourers return to harvest the guano by hand every few years The Colony was made during one of these rare harvests. Accompanied by Daniel Wohl’s elegiac soundtrack, Dinh’s films capture the contemporary labourers involved in the backbreaking work, transporting and loading the guano on to boats, echoing the burden of their predecessors. The arid and unforgiving landscape and the drones’ unmanned explorations of empty and abandoned buildings, with their traces of former inhabitants, leave viewers in no doubt of the human suffering and isolation that haunt the island landscapes.
Dinh Q. Lê, The Colony, 2016
Commissioned by Artangel, Ikon, Birmingham, Han Nefkens H+F Collection, Proyecto Amil, Lima, with additional support from, Catherine Petitgas, Private Collection, New York, Shoshana Wayne Gallery. Produced by Artangel and TANQ Studios, this project was supported by Arts Council England, Artangel International Circle, Special Angels, Guardian Angels and The Company of Angels.
The Colony is part of The Artangel Collection, an initiative to bring outstanding film and video works, commissioned and produced by Artangel, to galleries and museums across the UK. The Artangel Collection has been developed in partnership with Tate, is generously supported by the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation and The Foyle Foundation and uses public funding from Arts Council England.
