the forest lives on as unfinished film reels

Opening Reception: 18:00 – 20:00, Friday, March 27, 2026
Exhibition Dates: March 28 – May 30, 2026
Address: Rare Sea – 3 Đặng Thị Nhu, Bến Thành Ward, Hồ Chí Minh City
Opening Hours: 10:00 – 18:00, Tuesday – Sunday, or by appointment
Free admission.

Rare Sea is pleased to introduce the forest lives on as unfinished film reels, a group show with the participation of four artists Aliansyah Caniago, Xuân-Hạ, Rab, and Hoàng Vũ. Featuring multi-medium artworks, spanning sculpture, silk & Korean traditional paper painting, installation, and moving image, the exhibition explores the lingering existence of materials and spirits as interlocutors on urbanism, production, and labor of modern society.

Urban space and industrialization often drape themselves in fantastical promises of a stable and prosperous future, where labor is a one-way ticket to happiness. What has been pushed aside in the name of progress? Do they carry any momentum of memories and histories? And should we listen, observe, touch, smell and feel them? In the forest lives on as unfinished film reels, what remains invisible within the intimate and collective spaces of urbanism and production is exaggerated, saturated and glorified: fauna ghosts, noises, mythical creatures, repetitive gestures. From these vestiges, both human and non-human, the exhibition excavates what has been erased and what haunts us, reflecting perspectives on labor, dwelling, and the residual consequences of industrial society.

At the entrance, Aliansyah Caniago opens a space of refuge in remnants of colonialism. Aliansyah traces the spirits of camphor tree forest still residing within materials produced through colonial extraction–not to memorialize, but to break them down from within. His works propose alternative ways of sensing history: scattering processed film reels into a floating graveyard, reciting and dissecting colonial reports until they dissolve into meaningless sound, and proposing scent as an archival medium for the asymmetrical exchange routes across the Indian Ocean. Materials become both monument and coffin, holding space for collective values that were erased and borrowed, while opening dialogues between the profane and the sacred, between colonial extraction and the spiritual endurance of a people.

Hoàng Vũ and Rab lead viewers into spaces of construction, production, and imagination on the first floor. Both artists anatomize the production process through exploring contrasting materialities. Hoàng Vũ anchors a visual-audio vantage point in learning about the positionality of a newly renovated building. He uses noise recorded from the construction, along with field recordings on the city’s streets, treating construction mesh and metal scaffolding as an acoustic buffer zone. Listening carefully to the marginal sonic particles of urban life, he questions what material dialogues might emerge from urban space. In Rab’s imaginary factory, the human body loses its individuality, becoming a mass-produced commodity. Rab critiques the absurdity of biological exchange as a commercial transaction. From personal observation and intertwinning with mythological perspective, Rab traces the disappearance of creatures displaced by urbanization from lands that once belonged to them. Together, Hoàng Vũ and Rab propose non-human ways of inquiry: one listening from the building’s construction skeleton, the other through the eyes of a magpie.

The exhibition concludes on the second floor, in a space made tangible by invisible gestures of labor. In Rare Sea’s kitchen—a more intimate space in the gallery—Xuân-Hạ’s three-channel video invites reflection on gendered labor within the household area. The work evokes the residing of intergenerational ties among women working in the communal yet vulnerable spaces of the home: the kitchen, the bathroom, and the washing room. Repetitive gestures weave memory into the space, which becomes shaped by unnamed acts often draped as expressions of care. As they expose what has been silenced as gendered trauma within these rooms, these gestures also weave the warmth of care back into memory, becoming a poignant ode to the women who came before and a quiet critique of the system that rendered their labor invisible. Through these repetitive acts, the artist keeps returning to unfinished stories, acknowledging that what haunts also holds.

the forest lives on as unfinished film reels speaks to the dwelling of spirits meant to be erased after the act of labor and production. Residing in a recently renovated building in an urban area, the exhibition also invites engagement with a space where art labor continues to cultivate alternative, critical lenses on progress.

ABOUT ARTISTS

Aliansyah Caniago (b. 1987, Indonesia) is an artist based in Banda Aceh whose practice spans site-specific installation, performance, painting, and archival research. Growing up amid rapid industrialisation in Indonesia, his work critically examines ecological loss, extractivism, and the consequences of modernity for both human and more-than-human worlds. Since 2016, his research has focused on Barus, North Sumatra, once the centre of global camphor trade, where colonial extraction led to the destruction of sacred camphor forests and the erosion of Batak cosmologies.
Camphor functions in his work as both material and metaphor, connecting spiritual belief, colonial science, and industrial technologies such as celluloid film. Through artistic practices involving scent, touch, ritual, and the body, Aliansyah activates fragmented archives and oral histories to reanimate suppressed narratives and embodied memory. His works have been presented internationally, including at Documenta Fifteen (Germany), MUMA (Australia), the Jakarta Biennale. He is a graduate of MA Art and Ecology, Goldsmiths, University of London.

Xuân-Hạ is an art worker whose practice spans roles as an artist and organizer. Working across moving image, installation, and conceptual art, she translates personal imaginaries and collective memories into visual narratives. Her work creates discursive spaces that critically examine the fluidity of identity, the impermanence of place, and the fragility of cultural continuity amid social and environmental transformations.

Her works have been presented at international film festivals and exhibitions, including the Asian Avant-Garde Film Festival 2025 (M+ Museum, Hong Kong), Painting with Light Film Festival 2022 (National Gallery Singapore), the Kyoto University Visual Documentary Project (VDP) 2021, and Jakarta Biennale ESOK 2021 (Museum of National Awakening, Indonesia), as well as at various independent and institutional art spaces nationally and internationally. Alongside her artistic practice, Xuân-Hạ is deeply engaged in cultivating local art communities in Vietnam. She is a co-founder of Chaosdowntown Cháo (HCMC, 2015–2019) and the founder of A Sông (Da Nang, 2019–present). She has been awarded for the International Future Leaders Program 2022-23 by The Australia Council for the Arts, and recently received the Fellows Award: Cultural & Artistic Responses to the Environmental Crisis 2024 (CAREC) by Prince Claus Fund.

Bui Bao Tram, also known as Rab (b. 2000), is a multimedia artist based in Ho Chi Minh City. Rab's practices address the themes of collective and personal memory, investigating the dialogues and exchanges that occur within relationships. This exploration aims to raise questions and discourse regarding societal and humanity.

In 2023, Rab presented her first solo exhibition, "Nằm mơ đan lưới trời" (Dreaming of Weaving the Sky Net) featuring site-specific installations and performance. Rab has participated in various projects, such as Arts Intensive Study Program (The Fire Station, Qatar Museums, Qatar, 2025-2026), ARKO Art Studio Residency (Arts Council Korea, Seoul, Korea, 2025), There is no center, Group exhibition (ROH, Indonesia, 2025), Saigon City Slang group exhibition (Sàn Art, Vietnam, 2024), S.E.A. Focus (Singapore, 2024), The Unknown, Choreographed (Á Space & 3nam Studio, Vietnam, 2023), etc. In 2025, Rab received the Prince Claus Seed Award from Prince Claus Fund (Amsterdam, Netherlands) and was nominated for Finest Artists from Hanoi Grapevine, Vietnam. Rab also co-founded Bụi Tre Collective - an artist-run collective aimed at providing support for emerging experimental artists in Vietnam.

Hoàng Vũ (b. 1996, Mekong Delta, Vietnam) is a multidisciplinary artist based in Saigon, working across sound, poetry and visual arts. Hoàng Vũ is also an experimental ambient music producer.
With sound as his primary focus, his practice centers on atmosphere and phenomena, within liminal space, states of waiting, and shifting boundaries. Alongside his compositional work, he develops research-based projects engaging ecological soundscapes and site-specific phenomena shaped by urbanization and ongoing environmental instability that continuously reshape the landscape.

ABOUT THE CURATOR

Lại Minh Ngọc was born in Hanoi and is currently based in Saigon, Vietnam. Graduated in Social Studies and Art & Media Studies at Fulbright University Vietnam, she is taking small steps in practicing photography, documentary film, ethnographic film, and curation. Ngọc views artistic practices as a multidimensional approach to social research, especially issues and representation of sex and gender woven within the changing of urban space.

ABOUT RARE SEA

Rare Sea is an independent contemporary art organisation based in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. Opening in January 2026, Rare Sea supports artistic practice through exhibitions, studio-based research, professional development, and public engagement.

Through its programming, Rare Sea fosters artistic exchange and builds platforms for creative practice and international cross-cultural dialogue in Vietnam and beyond, grounded in sustained, forward looking engagement with artists, curators, and local communities.

CONTACT

Address: 3 Đặng Thị Nhu, Ben Thanh Ward, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

For further inquiries or to book a visit, please contact us via email info@raresea.vn

Website: raresea.vn

Instagram: @raresea.vn
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/rareseavn
Phone: +84 937891284