Jacqueline Hoàng Nguyễn investigates issues of historicity, collectivity, utopian politics, and multiculturalism via feminist theories.

Nguyễn’s work often takes the form of installations that combine audio, video, printmaking, and photography. She employs a research-based process where she often uses archival material to reveal the unnoticed political relevance in overlooked histories.

Nguyễn will present an updated version of her work For An Epidemic Resistance (2009/2021), a twenty-five channel sound installation. This work takes its starting point in an unexplained laughter epidemic phenomenon, which occurred in central Africa in 1962. An explosion of laughter took place at a mission-run girls’ middle school in the village of Kashasha over the course of six months and infected several hundred people in the community and neighbouring villages. In this new version presented at Borås Art Biennial, new laughter is added to the new iteration of the installation.

Laughter doesn’t necessarily always signal joy; it can also be a signal of distress, spurred by collective anxieties, anger, or sadness linked to a time of worry, especially when people are experiencing chronic societal stress. However, laughter and humour can also according to cultural theorist Marjolein’t Hart, function as a true “weapon of the weak”, furthering the development of collective identity.

Jacqueline Hoàng Nguyễn comes from Canada and is currently a PhD researcher at Konstfack (the University of Arts, Crafts and Design) and KTH (the Royal Insti­tute of Technology) in Stockholm. Her education includes the Whitney Independent Study Program in New York, the Malmö Art Acad­emy, and Concordia University in Montreal. Nguyễn’s work has been shown internationally at institu­tions including Bonniers Konsthall, Stockholm, Sweden (2021); the Július Koller Society, Bratislava, Slovakia (2019); CAMPLE LINE, Scotland, UK (2019); and Trinity Square Video, Toronto, Canada, (2019).