The 61st International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia announces its closing program with performances, lectures, debates, and roundtables from Friday 13th to Sunday 22nd November. As part of this program will be presented Timaeus and The Teacher: Foreword, a new aria written and directed by artist Tammy Nguyen, whose work is prominently featured in In Minor Keys, curated by Koyo Kouoh. Composed by Neely Bruce, choreographed by Jamal Jackson, and performed by Brian Vu, the work was commissioned and produced by Wesleyan University’s Center for the Arts. It will debut in Venice (Arsenale, Tese dei Soppalchi) on Friday, November 13 and Saturday, November 14. Exploring themes of freedom and nationhood, Timaeus and The Teacher: Foreword draws inspiration from Nguyen’s family history and the artist’s multidisciplinary practice.
Over the past decade, Nguyen’s dynamic practice has explored the intersections of geopolitics, ecology, and history, employing a distinctive visual language to weave together disparate subjects and examine the moral complexities that shape global history. Across Nguyen’s work, the tension between her graceful forms and harmonious aesthetics often belies the nature of her non-linear storytelling. Nguyen’s research-based process involves a close reading of foundational texts across the Western canon. Timaeus and The Teacher: Foreword references Plato’s Timaeus, a meditation on cosmic order in which the Greek philosopher postulates that music is the cosmos’ purest expression. By generating compositional push and pull between the visible and invisible, she invites the viewer to question preconceived notions of history.
Timaeus and The Teacher: Foreword builds on ideas Nguyen first explored in an exhibition created for the Sarasota Art Museum, examining “Flags of Convenience,” a maritime practice that allows shipowners to register vessels under the flag of another country in order to benefit from more favorable tax and labor regulations. Approximately 46 nations, the majority of them former colonies, have made their flags available through this system. Nguyen began fractalizing the flags and anthems of these nations, recombining them into new patterns and forms. Extending this visual and conceptual system into the opera, Bruce’s score dismantles and recombines national anthems, mirroring the fluidity of national borders at sea. For the libretto, Nguyen has used a Fibonacci sequence germane to Plato’s philosophy to break apart traditional English language structures. Like the imagery in Nguyen’s painting, language in the opera is fractalized and reassembled in ways that create new meaning through patterns and repetition.
At the center of the work is The Teacher, played by Brian Vu, a young Vietnamese man who makes a living teaching English to Chinese gold merchants before attempting to flee Saigon by boat in 1977. Loosely based on Nguyen’s father, The Teacher encounters a group of travelers who share his yearning for liberty. As they move between nations, the voyagers become entangled in the complexities of global maritime trade, where national identity functions as a form of currency—facilitating the circulation of goods while restricting the movement of people. Caught in the violence of this contradiction, The Teacher begins to question what it means to seek national belonging in a world shaped by the forces of nature. Drifting through this unstable terrain, The Teacher and his companions confront a world in which freedom is both promised and deferred, and where the order of the cosmos collides with the shifting politics of human borders.
The performance unfolds within a set designed by Nguyen, centered on a circular tapestry whose form references Timaeus’ diagram of the cosmos. In the spirit of Nguyen’s maximalist and layered approach to painting, the entire world emerges from this quilted ring, dense with imagery. Brought to life by a team of dancers, the ring can be manipulated into various shapes, absorb and reflect light, and reveal ever-shifting environments. The ring becomes the sea, a ship, mountain ranges, and much more. The moving bodies and the ring blur the lines between what is human and what is nature, putting into question the project of nation-building, its necessity for humanity, and its folly.
Timaeus and The Teacher: Foreword is a 45-minute performance that will be presented in Venice. The full opera will premiere at a later date.