55 HIGHLIGHT NEW MEDIA THANKS TO THE CONTEMPORARY ASSOCIATES, SCMA has acquired video works by Yto Barrada and Hu’o’ng Ngô. Both artists employ a variety of media— including video, performance, photography, sculpture and installation—to make assiduously researched works that explore representation, power and memory. The works join the museum’s growing collection of time- based media work, which is already the largest in the region and includes Contemporary Associates-funded purchases by the artists Candice Breitz, Cao Fei, Andrea Fraser, Kimsooja, and Beat Streuli. Abstract and poetic, the three-channel installation Playground expands on Yto Barrada’s work in photography, sculpture and film, including her most iconic work, The Strait Project: A Life Full of Holes (1998–2004). Barrada, who was born in Paris in 1971 but grew up in Tangier, is an artist deeply concerned with the transformations that her hometown has experienced since King Mohammed VI took the Moroccan throne in 1999. Playground brings to life Tangier’s changing landscape and the many people, animals and plants who call Morocco’s northernmost city home. In a nod to the city’s popularity with film- makers both Moroccan and foreign since the advent of cinema, Barrada shot Playground on 16mm film. Yet, while the work retains much of film’s visual texture, its depiction of everyday labor and leisure shows a Tangier far different from the city mythologized by nationalist, colonialist and Orientalist visual culture. The Voice is an Archive is emblematic of Hu’o’ng Ngô’s interest in archives, feminist history and the places where the personal and the political intersect. Ngô, who now lives in Chicago, was born in 1979 in Hong Kong, where her family took refuge after the Vietnam War before they immigrated to the United States. In the six-minute-long documentation of a performance by Ngô, her sister and her niece, the two women and the girl appear with white earbuds, as if on a video call. At moments laughing and at others quietly tearing up, each tries to sing along in Vietnamese to a recording of Ngô’s mother. The video reflects on how individual bodies transmit language and culture across generations and tells a story of the familial bonds and archival materials that survive forced migration. TOP LEFT: Yto Barrada. Moroccan, born 1971. Playground, 2010. Three-channel video installation, digitized 16mm film, color, mute, 21 min., dimensions variable, edition 1 of 5 (artwork © Yto Barrada, image provided by Yto Barrada). Purchased with funds from the Contemporary Associates BOTTOM RIGHT: Hu’o’ng Ngô, American, born 1979. The Voice is an Archive, 2016. Single-channel digital video, black-and-white, sound, 6 min., dimensions variable, edition 1 of 5 (artwork © Hu’o’ng Ngô, image provided by Hu’o’ng Ngô). Purchased with funds from the Contemporary Associates