Whitney Biennial 2017

Floor 6

Born 1960 in Saigon, Vietnam
Lives in Brooklyn, NY

In a suite of photographs from her new project, The Silent General, An-My Lê examines allusions to the past in modern-day Louisiana. In one image, a monument to a Confederate Army general quietly interrupts a quotidian urban landscape; another captures a moment on the set of a recent film about a Confederate Army deserter. As in so many of Lê’s works, in these images the imagined past and the actual present coexist in the same frame, begging the question: when does history end and the present begin? Taken as a group, the photographs propose that perhaps history never ends, that the raw materials of America’s bloodiest war—issues of race, class, labor, and wealth—are still deeply enmeshed in the landscape of the United States and the fabric of its society.