Jacqueline Hoang Nguyen explores a forgotten landmark and its history in her multi-part installation Space Fiction & the Archives: the world’s first UFO landing pad. Built in the Canadian town of St. Paul, Alberta, on the occasion of the celebrations honouring Canada’s centennial in 1967, it was intended to symbolise the country’s cosmo(s)politanism. At a time of extreme political tension in the United States, Europe and the former Soviet Union, Canada was undergoing a period of festive euphoria, hosting Expo ’67 in Montreal and becoming a pioneer of multiculturalism with its demonstrative urbanity. Nguyen’s exhibition encompassing a film (1967: A People Kind of Place) and a collection of documents, photographs and sculptures takes the viewer on a trip back through time to this incongruous episode of Canadian history. Science fiction and identity politics enter in the process into an unconventional relationship that poses questions regarding the ideological structure of a multicultural society and the concept of the “alien”.
Jacqueline Hoang Nguyen (born 1979 in Montreal, lives in Brooklyn and Stockholm) studied in Montreal, Malmö and New York City, and has already been awarded a number of prizes and grants, including from the Canada Council for the Arts (2012) and Iaspis, Swedish Arts Grants Committee (2010). Her most recent solo exhibitions could be seen at VOX: Centre de l'image contemporaine, Montreal (2012) and the Skånska Konstmuseum, Lund (2009).

Jacqueline Hoang Nguyen -