Building a Monumental Anti-Monument: Patricia Nguyen

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This talk explores Breath, Form, and Freedom, a memorial designed by Dr. Patricia Nguyen for the Chicago Torture Justice Memorial Project, the first memorial in the U.S. to honor survivors of police torture, established through a historic Reparations ordinance. 

Monuments can trap a sense of history in time, suspending it in its material form and mode of engagement with its public. This project reimagines how memorials can be activated with communities. Drawing connections between the history of slavery and international wars, the memorial was conceived as a public archive, educational platform, and contemplative space, one rooted in transnational struggles for liberation. Dr. Nguyen will discuss the guiding vision behind “building a monumental anti-monument," where time does not stand still within the memorial to commemorate history as past, but a past that is still present and its scale undeniable.

Monuments, Memory, and the Making of History

From monuments and museums to oral histories and digital archives, acts of commemoration are never neutral. They reflect power, silence, resistance, and the ongoing negotiation of historical narratives. Organized by the Columbia Global Paris Center, this series interrogates whose memories are preserved, whose are marginalized, and how public remembrance can both reinforce and challenge dominant accounts of Empire and nation building.

Speaker

Patricia Nguyen is an artist, educator, and scholar born and raised in Chicago, Illinois. Dr. Nguyen earned her Ph.D. in performance studies at Northwestern University and is currently an assistant professor in American studies at the University of Virginia. She has published work in Women Studies Quarterly, Women and Performance, AmerAsia, Journal of Asian American Studies, Harvard Kennedy School's Asian American Policy Review, The Funambulist, and The Methuen Drama Anthology of Modern Asian Plays. Patricia has over 20 years’ experience working in arts education, community development, racial justice, and human rights in the United States and Vietnam. Community engagement is a fundamental ethos of her practice as an artist committed to liberation. Her art practice emerges from a place of departure, rupture, presence, and possibilities as a child of refugees. Through embodied research, performance, installation, and community engagement she explores ecologies of freedom, migration, borders, and war to reveal histories of violence and imagine decolonial futures. As a performance artist, she has performed at the Nha San Collective in Vietnam, Mission Cultural Center in San Francisco, Jane Addams Hull House, Links Hall, Prague Quadrennial, Museum of Memory and Human Rights in Chile, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Milwaukee Art Museum, and Contemporary Arts Network. Nguyen is co-founder and executive director of Axis Lab, a community centered art, food, and design studio based in Chicago that focuses on ethical development. She is also an award-winning designer for the Chicago Torture Justice Memorial Project, part of a historic reparation’s ordinance.

Patricia Nguyen is currently in residence at the Ateliers Médicis as part of the Clichycago program, produced by the Ateliers Médicis. This residency is in collaboration with the Villa Albertine and the Terra Foundation for American Art Europe in the United States.

Ateliers Médicis

The Ateliers Médicis are dedicated to fostering the emergence of new and diverse artistic voices, and to supporting artists with singular and contemporary forms of expression. They host artists in residence across all disciplines and support the creation of works developed in connection with territory. They encourage and organize encounters between artists and residents.

Located in Clichy-sous-Bois and Montfermeil in the Seine-Saint-Denis department, they currently operate from a temporary facility. A large-scale venue of national ambition is planned for completion by 2027, reaffirming the role of artistic creation in suburban areas.

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This event will take place in Reid Hall’s Grande Salle Ginsberg-LeClerc, built in 1912 and extensively renovated in 2023 thanks to the generous support of Judith Ginsberg and Paul LeClerc.

Reid Hall, the Columbia Global Paris Center, and the Institute for Ideas and Imagination are not responsible for the views and opinions expressed by their speakers and guests.

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