Over The Opening (OTO) presents Secret School Session 01: Wheel In the Sky by Huong Ngo :: January 17, 2009; 7 - 10 pm :: Over The Opening (MTAA’s Studio), N6th St., Brooklyn, NY [map and directions].

OTO is pleased to present the first installment of Huong Ngo’s nomadic curatorial project Secret School featuring the work of artist Hong-An Truong. Secret School explores the importance of the hidden and invisible in the social identity of a community through a series of time-based events and collaborations. Ranging from the political to the personal, epic to the quotidian, unknown to unknowable, how do secrets function in the transfer and preservation of power? At a time in which oversaturation of readily available information already exceeds our capacity for adequate synthesis, how can the poetics of secrets cut through the logic of facts? When does the form of a secret supersede its content, and under what circumstances must information remain a secret?

Secret School Session 01 presents Wheel In the Sky, a three-channel video installation by Hong-An Truong. Wheel In the Sky investigates the possibilities of media to bear witness to moments of trauma and moments of poetry when human memory fails. As the video unfolds, the artist questions her father about his interest in the band Journey, and his responses reveal a frustration and acute sensitivity to the loss of meaning in the translation from their native Vietnamese tongue into English and vice versa. The conversation also suggests what impact the years of colonization have had on his perception of Vietnam’s most treasured art form, the poem. Secret School will collaborate with Hong-An Truong to create a text that reveals, complicates, and further conceals what is lost in translation, creating a liminal space out of what is inexpressible.