Uncatalogued: Vietnam and Archives of Visual Culture. Some Reflections

This year marks the 50th anniversary of the end of the American War in Vietnam, a milestone that has inspired commemorations and documentary projects both within the country and abroad. This anniversary creates a crucial opportunity to examine overlooked visual legacies, particularly Vietnam’s cultural and historical connections with the UK, which is home to a significant Vietnamese diasporic community.

Building on this moment of reflection, the symposium Uncatalogued: Vietnam and Archives of Visual Culture (June 27–29, 2025) took place across two London venues — the MayDay Rooms and the Dalston CLR James Library — and was conceived as a continuation of Sensing Photography, a series of talks, exhibitions, and workshops organized by Trâm Lương and Jacqueline Hoàng Nguyễn (February 21–28, 2025, at Fulbright University Vietnam and other satellite locations in Ho Chi Minh City).¹

Uncatalogued is a collaborative initiative between Jacqueline Hoàng Nguyễn and Adeena Mey, organized in conjunction with the exhibition Võ An Khánh: Mangrove Theater at IC Visual Lab in Bristol, curated together with Dogma Collection.² [fig.0] The exhibition marked the first solo presentation of photographer Võ An Khánh outside Vietnam and included a commissioned transcription of a conversation between the photographer and scholar Thy Phu, conducted in Bạc Liêu, Vietnam, on May 13, 2013.

This text reflects on the London symposium, tracing how each panelist creatively engaged with the challenges of uncatalogued, uninventoried, and incomplete archives, and offered new ways of imagining what an archive can hold.

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