An-My Lê

This installation, specially made for An-My Lê: Between Two Rivers, recalls the traditional painted cycloramas of nineteenth- century Europe—circular panoramas that before the advent of the cinema were a popular form of spectacle. The cyclorama presented viewers with unbroken, idealized landscapes; that such landscapes were achieved and maintained through military and colonial means was the unspoken premise, an authority inseparable from their visual continuity.

Lê’s version offers an immersive experience while also disrupting this authority through the gaps between discontinuous images taken in different years, starting in the 1990s, and in different places, among them the My Thuan Bridge over the Mekong River in Vietnam, the banks of Bayou St. John in New Orleans, Hanoi seen from the village of Bát Tràng, the gardens of the former Château de Saint-Cloud outside Paris, the majestic Ban Gioc Falls on the border between China and Vietnam, and the sugarcane fields of Houma, Louisiana. This gathering together of landscapes and entangled histories embodies Lê’s idea that “history doesn’t move through time in a straight line.”