Founded in 2006 in Ho Chi Minh City, The Propeller Group is a collaborative platform bringing together three multi-disciplinary artists: Phunam Thuc Ha, Tuan Andrew Nguyen, and Matt Lucero, who joined the group in 2008. Working across film, photography, sculpture, and installation, the collective merges the languages of advertising and politics to spark conversations about power, propaganda, and public perception. The group first drew wide attention with a 2011 advertising parody titled Television Commercial for Communism, in which they hired a global advertising firm to market Communist ideology through capitalist means — a project later included in the New Museum’s 2012 Triennial. True to its name, the collective operates simultaneously as an advertising agency, a production company, and an artist co-op, describing itself as a platform for collective thinking and coordinated action.
This exhibition features The Living Need Light, The Dead Need Music (2014), a single-channel film that combines actual footage and staged portrayals of Vietnamese funeral rituals, shifting fluidly between documentary and poetic registers. The title borrows from a Vietnamese Buddhist proverb calling for joyful music to be played for the dead, and the film follows several funeral processions led by brass musicians, alongside a cast of surreal figures — spiritual mediums, professional criers, and street performers — who transform mourning rites into euphoric rites of passage. Shot both in-studio and on location in the Mekong Delta, the work stands as the group’s most personal undertaking to date: a meditation on life and loss, and an homage to the performers who occupy the threshold between this world and the afterlife.
Music drives the film’s structure, opening with traditional Vietnamese instrumentation and closing with a New Orleans–style brass band — a deliberate bridge between two cultures. The Propeller Group has pointed to the striking similarity between funeral processions in Vietnam and New Orleans, both historically led by brass bands, as evidence of what the group calls a kind of “non-locality”: two distinct traditions echoing one another across a vast expanse of space and time. Fittingly, the film was created for Prospect.3, the third edition of the Prospect New Orleans triennial, in 2014.
Since its debut, the work has traveled widely, including presentations at the 56th Venice Biennale in 2015 and the Göteborg International Biennial for Contemporary Art, as well as a dedicated exhibition at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh.
The opening reception for this exhibition took place on December 1, 2018, at 6:00 p.m.
