The Embassy of Belgium, the Embassy of Germany, and the Goethe-Institut Hanoi will co-organize the exhibition ‘Eroica 2020’ by artist Nguyen Le Hoang Viet next week to commemorate Beethoven’s 250th birthday.   

The exhibition will open daily from 9:00 am until 7:00 pm between January 26 and February 4 in the exhibition hall of the Goethe-Institut, the organizers said in a press release on Thursday.

An opening event will take place at 6:00 pm on January 25.

‘Eroica 2020’ is a contribution from Vietnam to the international exhibition Hotel Beethoven, which has been organized by BOZAR, which is the Center for Fine Arts in Brussels, in collaboration with the Bundeskunsthalle Bonn, with funds coming from by the German Minister of State for Culture and the Media in the framework of the German Presidency of the Council of the European Union.

The exhibition is to commemorate Beethoven’s 250th birthday, falling on December 17, 2020.

Hotel Beethoven is an exhibition about Beethoven, his music, his ideas, and his relevance for the world heritage of music today.

As an exceptional innovator, Beethoven is considered a perennial starting point and source of inspiration for questions and ideas about the power of sound.

From popular culture to conceptual art, spanning a time frame from 1770 to 2020, Hotel Beethoven is a time-traveling musical mix of different eras and points of view that features manuscripts and instruments alongside works from such artists as Antoine Bourdelle, Raoul Hausmann, Andy Warhol, Katie Paterson, Christan Marclay, Christine Sun Kim, and John Baldessari.

The exhibition in Brussels can be visited until February 14.

BOZAR invited six visual artists from Albania, Austria, the Czech Republic, Egypt, Russia, and Vietnam to be accommodated in the Hotel Beethoven.

The Vietnamese contribution to this international celebration is an 11-minute film directed by Nguyen Le Hoang Viet.

2020 is marked by the COVID-19 pandemic and many forms of social distancing and quarantine measures.

Humans had to stay inside rooms and the distance between people in public is specifically defined.

Viet turns to Beethoven’s music and wonders if it can provide people with a window to escape the four walls surrounding them.  

Blending a time-stretched version of Symphony No. 3 ‘Eroica’ – the monumental masterpiece of Beethoven – with zoom-ins, zoom-outs, and shots of Hanoians’ daily life activities, this video installation invites audiences on a visual journey of human survival in this strange time.

Viet gained international recognition as a filmmaker in the following festivals: Short Shorts, BFI Flare London, and Festival of 3 Continents.