IN DEPTH
TUAN ANDREW NGUYEN
“Erasing is a choice … but remembering is also a choice,” says Macodou Ndiaye, a lawyer from Dakar who only discovered, near age 20, that he was métis, born in Vietnam to a Vietnamese mother and Senegalese father. Ndiaye is one of the three protagonists in Tuan Andrew Nguyen’s cinematic four-channel video and photo installation The Specter of Ancestors Becoming (2019), which uncovers the little-known stories of the small Vietnamese-Senegalese community in Dakar, and was commissioned for Sharjah Biennial 14 as part of curator Zoe Butt’s exhibition-platform “Beyond the Arrow.”
The marginal community’s members in Dakar are the living descendants of West African soldiers known as , who were conscripted into the French colonial army throughout the 20th century and, in its waning days, were sent to
