Trinh T. Minh-Ha

Filmmaker, composer, poet, writer, literary critic and teacher, Trinh T. Minh-ha (Hanoi, 1952) is one of the world’s most important voices in independent cinema. Since the early 1980s, she has produced a cinematic and theoretical set of work that is considered vital for postcolonial feminist approaches, significantly shifting the boundaries between documentary and fiction and falling under the complex category of ‘experimental ethnographic cinema’.

After emigrating to the United States in 1970, during the Vietnam War, she taught at the National Conservatory of Music and Dramatic Arts in Dakar (Senegal) from 1977. Dating back to this time are the publication African Spaces: Designs for Living in Upper Volta (1985), together with the photographer and architect Jean-Paul Bourdier, and her first two 16mm films, Reassemblage (1982) and Naked Spaces – Living Is Round (1985), both produced by Bourdier, as well as the rest of her filmography. Minh-ha taught in the Departments of Rhetoric and Gender and Women’s Studies at UC Berkeley (California) from 1992 to 2022. 

She has made nine films until now: Surname Viet Given Name Nam (1989), Shoot for the Contents (1991), A Tale of Love (1995), The Fourth Dimension (2001), Night Passage (2004), Forgetting Vietnam (2016) and What About China? (2022), in addition to those mentioned above. 

Her poetic-theoretical writings include: Women, Native, Other (1989), When the Moon Waxes Red (1991), Elsewhere, Within Here (2011) and Lovecidal: Walking with The Disappeared (2016), as well as various collections of interviews and the film scripts for Framer Framed (1992), Cinema Interval (1999), The Digital Film Event (2005) and D-Passage: The Digital Way (2013).

This is Trinh T. Minh-ha’s first exhibition in Spain.