Exhibition

Kvet Nguyen: Practicing Otherness

2 Nov 2022 – 2 Dec 2022

Regular hours

Monday
10:00 – 16:00
Tuesday
10:00 – 16:00
Wednesday
10:00 – 16:00
Thursday
10:00 – 16:00
Friday
10:00 – 16:00
Saturday
Closed
Sunday
Closed

Free admission

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Slovak Institute Budapest

Budapest, Hungary

Event map

Kvet Nguyen: Practicing Otherness

About

What is identity and how is it shaped and influenced by its environment? How can a diasporic community shape and preserve its collective memory and how can it avoid ‘collective amnesia’ (Koleka Putuma)? Memory, the notion of belonging and the diasporic identity of the Slovak-Vietnamese community is shaped by diverse influences and experiences. Often photography facilitates the preservation of memories and serves as a reminder of distant places. However, at the same time, photography is an imperial and colonial tool.

Artist Kvet Nguyen searches for ways to use photography in a decolonial way with the aim to tell her own diasporic story. As Ariella Aïsha Azoulay writes: ‘Unlearning photography as a field apart means first and foremost foregrounding the regime of imperial rights that made its emergence possible.’ (2019) It means to start with the acknowledgement of the camera as a tool for exercising of violence. This awareness is very consciously used in Nguyen’s artistic practice. In Reframing possibilities, 2020, the artist works with the power aspect of photography depicting it through archive images from the colonial period in Vietnam, where the artist’s family originally emigrated from to Slovakia. By working experimentally with these archival photographs accompanied by performative and autobiographical images, the artist seeks a representation of her own identity and family history, and for a way to use the photographic tool in a decolonial way. An anti-colonial vision of cross-cultural identities through collected conversations with people of diverse origins who have experience of the Slovak environment makes up part of her photobook and the consequent photo installation piece Mutual Otherness, 2021. The result is abstracted forms that speak of the fine line between the visible and the invisible, the known and the unknown, of sameness and otherness. The artist explores her dual identity in her work You are not allowed to mix apples and pears here, 2020. This work examines what it means to become a person of dual or multiple identities, when your family history blends in with your experience of your present environment.

A Vietnamese-American essayist and poet Ocean Vuong writes:

‘In Vietnamese, the word for missing someone and remembering them is the same: nhớ. Sometimes, when you ask me over the phone, Con nhớ mẹ không? I flintch, thinking you meant, Do you remember me?

I miss you more than I remember you.’

It could be used as a metaphor for reading Nguyen’s artistic practice. When growing up in a diaspora, memory is a crucial part of who you are. Her work is about experiencing a feeling of otherness and overcoming it through artistic practice that encompasses two aspects of diasporic story: missing and at the same time trying to remember the family’s history, culture and personal story. In the case of Kvet Nguyen, this story is told through photography.

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Koleka Putuma. 2017. Collective Amnesia, Manyano Media.

Ariella Aïsha Azoulay. 2019. Potential History. Unlearning Imperialism. Verso.

Ocean Vuong. 2019. On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous: A Novel. Penguin Press.

CuratorsToggle

Denisa Tomkova

Exhibiting artistsToggle

Kvet Nguyen

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