The New York debut of the Propeller Group’s twenty-minute video The Living Need Light, the Dead Need Music (2014), that was commissioned for the 2014 New Orleans Biennial, ‘Prospect.3: Notes for Now’, is best summed up by the biennial’s curator Franklin Sirmans’s description of the works as ‘how we see ourselves through others’. On entering James Cohan Gallery’s Lower East Side space, we are accosted by astounding images of magic, rituals, and funerary rights from South Vietnam. Composed by the Group’s three members, Phunam Thuc Ha, Tuan Andrew Nguyen, and Matt Lucero, who are based between Vietnam and Los Angeles, the images fit a Western conception of exoticism while exemplifying the significance of identity in the southern hemisphere, the regions that post-colonialists refer to as the Global South.
The Propeller Group’s montage begins through the narrow back alleys of colourful, closely built homes. Our initial encounter with the central androgynous figure, who later dies in a street fight, cuts quickly to various scenes, from a funeral dirge played by a brass band that walks through a swamp, to rituals of ceremonial warriors that perform before an altar, images of a coffin decorated with a carved wooden snake, and dreamy pithy Bollywood-type songs. Although the video is set in Saigon, the lush landscape, filled with swamps, brings to mind areas from India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Thailand and other countries in the region. The untouched quality of the tropical hinterland, that was popularised following the French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss’s trips to the Amazon in the 1940s, is generally raw and appealing. However, it generates deeper connections with countries in and around the region where people live in closely constructed structures and