Tales without Time – Poetry of Storytelling, June 29–September 21, 2025
ZINK, Waldkirchen, Germany

curated by Le Thien-Bao and Michael Zink

‘The waves breathed from the sea to the shore.’[1] There is an undeniable feeling of truth in that sentence. Description made perfection.
Maybe it is because it captures the idea that waves never truly end, vanishing on the sand but swallowed up and pushed forward again and again in a never-ending liquid, furious, and ancient dance.
As though the ocean was giving us a glimpse of the wisdom it holds; of its own stream of consciousness.

Mastered by Virginia Woolf, the stream genre privileges suggestion over explanation. Explored in a non-linear way by Camila Rodríguez Triana, Thao Nguyen Phan, Trương Công Tùng and Rosilene Luduvico, this literary form seems to be at the heart of their practice, where ancient tales and mundane life come together as part of one multi-layered and alternative present, and where the flow of self-centered thoughts become one of collective consciousness.

At Galerie Zink in Waldkirchen, the streams shapeshift from thoughts to threads, to sounds, to layers of lacquer. In ‘Journey of a piece of soil’ (2013-2016), Trương Công Tùng superposes several sonic streams as so many realities: cows, motorbikes, a barking dog, a strange deformed voice… We can hear everything all at once and our time-bound human gaze changes to an omniscient one. In her series ‘Palm of the hand’ (2025-ongoing), Thao Nguyen Phan casts a similar spell, but operates in fragments. It is not streams she uses but slices of sounds and voices, emphasizing the silences and unsaid truths that lie between the lines of her experimental narratives.

In both films, the landscapes seem to act as time capsules. Oscillating from rural sceneries to construction sites and the inside of a city, they echo Trương Công Tùng’s lacquer objects and their endless layers (‘As time passes through shadows’, 2023), metaphors of the scars of colonization still hidden in the Vietnamese soil.

The landscape, and in particular the figure of the tree imbues the exhibition. Present in the first shot of ‘Journey of a piece of soil’, it also appears in ‘Capitao do mato’, where Rosilene Ludivico paints a woman whose hair is entangled with branches, and in Camila Rodríguez Triana’s ‘Ukhu Pacha’ (2019). There, like a modern-day Moira, she weaves threads in the shape of trees, working her way between what was and what will be. Her movement accompanied by a sound by Holman Álvarez, she dives into her ancestor’s world, faced with pieces to recompose. With her choice to tell a story with no time and no end.

In their works, the artists do not use the male-dominated and western public tongue to tell the universes’ stories. They choose one, quiet as a whisper, that words have failed.

This reminds me of a woman I met who was studying birds’ formations. She said that, to this day, we still don’t know how this shared intelligence operates.
She said it was ‘applied magic’.

That is maybe where lies the artists’ enchantment: in their ability to access and flow through the murmurations[2] of life, magically capable of applying and hearing their collective wisdom.

Text by Justine Daquin
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[1] To the lighthouse, Virginia Woolf, 1927
[2] The action of birds flying and changing direction together / whispers

Justine Daquin has been working as a curator since 2018. In 2019, she coordinated the first architecture and landscape biennial in Versailles under the direction of Djamel Klouche and from 2018 to 2021, together with her collective Calypso36°21, she initiated and developed the traveling curatorial research program Out.of.the.blue.map that was inaugurated in Marseille for Manifesta13. Thanks to her research, Justine was selected as one of the residents of Tba21’s Ocean Space (2021), of Fluxus Art Project (2022), was invited to speak at Cove Park for COP26 in Glasgow (2021) and was one of the six first curators of the 'bureau des penseurs' at POUSH (2022-23). Justine joined Art Explora in 2023 and is now the head of artistic programs.