Liberation Radio

At the end of 2025, Index will present the exhibition Liberation Radio to commemorate the 50 years that have passed since the end of the Vietnam War. The exhibition is based on a multimedia installation by artist and filmmaker Esther Johnson, sound artist Nhung Nguyen and historian Matthew Sweet. The work centres on the little-known story of a group of American military deserters who in 1968 went to the North Vietnamese mission in Stockholm with one object in mind – to join the army they had been drafted to fight. Instead, they were recruited for the propaganda war – using magnetic tape, pop music and political rhetoric to persuade other American servicemen to desert the war. Their recordings were transported from Sweden to Vietnam by diplomatic channels, and broadcast from transmitters on the rooftops of Hanoi, and from revolutionary bases in the countryside. In collaboration with some of the surviving American deserters, Swedish anti-war activists and Vietnamese journalists from that time, the work brings Liberation Radio back to life.

The exhibition presents Liberation Radio as a starting point to talk about the role of culture in peace work during the Vietnam War and explores the potential of using and subverting the infrastructures and technologies of the prevailing power for one’s own agenda. By highlighting this specific event in Swedish history, the exhibition also makes the thought-provoking assumption that this type of collaboration between diplomacy, deserters and media-specific distribution is difficult to imagine in our own time.