Grandma, know that I miss you very a lot! I’ve longed for a number of years to have the ability to go to the Vietnamese countryside, to really feel the scent of residence, to see your face, to satisfy the remainder of the household, and maybe to see if I’ve outgrown you. Do you know that I’m already taller than all the ladies in my household right here?
I wrote my grandmother a letter 10 years in the past. On an outdated laptop, I typed the phrases with out Vietnamese punctation marks with loads of errors. I printed it out on my father’s printer and gave it to my mom to fill within the marks. With out them, the phrases wouldn’t make any sense. Solely I might learn them that manner. I used to be about 17 on the time and had an incredible love for the particular person, although I had met her solely thrice in my life. I used to be three, then 5 and at last fifteen after we met. And each time we have been aside, I felt an enormous affection for her. For it’s with my grandmother’s story that each one different tales start.
With out her, there wouldn’t be my mum, and with out my mum, I wouldn’t be right here.
With out her concept of going to a greater place, my dad and mom wouldn’t have gone to Europe.
With out it, I might have lived a distinct life, perhaps had a second little one on the way in which.
I usually ask myself who I might have been,
if I hadn’t been born in Slovakia.
For myself, it’s a curiosity {that a} letter written to my Vietnamese grandmother may be learn in Slovak. What coincidence of circumstances should come up for such a scenario to happen in any respect?
Though I put my grandmother within the position of the unique actor who performs out the entire story of our household, my father was the one who made every little thing occur. As youngsters of our dad and mom, we are inclined to overlook that they’ve lives of their very own. Ones with out us. Or no less than carry they think about these lives. That they’ve or had their very own ambitions, desires, foolish experiences, errors and we have been equally filled with doubts. I imagined what it was prefer to be my father when he grew to become a migrant.*
That is the primary exhibition of artwork of the Vietnamese diaspora in Slovakia. It’s a sensory house and an invite to dialogue, the place private recollections may be shared and (re)found. The house accommodates phrases, each written and spoken. It accommodates tales, each instructed and silenced. The design of the house references the Vietnamese tone marks that point out the six completely different tones of the Vietnamese language, a really delicate intervention into the house, but it surely’s the main points that depend after we need to talk, join, and share tales with others. It’s a house the place concepts of residence can develop and the place histories may be instructed, each private ones and nationwide ones, these merciless ones of warfare and compelled migration. This exhibition, whereas basing its examples and tales on the second era of the Vietnamese diaspora, desires to inform a extra advanced story about id, tradition, belonging, and the way we’re formed and influenced by our households, in addition to the society round us. It’s a story a few heterogeneous group of the Vietnamese diaspora with completely different histories and contexts. The socialist expertise of the Vietnamese in Czechoslovakia was completely different than in France, Germany or the US. Whereas the exhibition doesn’t purpose to retell the story of French colonization, the Vietnam Struggle, or American involvement in Vietnam, all of those occasions are however intertwined within the (hello)tales, private household recollections, and transgenerational traumas of the exhibiting artists. There are glimpses of trauma and loss within the works on show, however what unites these works total, and what this exhibition focuses on, is our relationship to households. It appears to be like for private tales. What generational traumas do we feature inside us? How does our relationship to household historical past inform and form who we’re? How can we protect recollections and the way do they affect our current feelings? Recollections can change into a type of resistance; remembering can act as a manner of presenting a diasporic, in any other case non-linear historical past.
When crossing borders, do you consider
what you’ll change into on the opposite aspect?
The phrase nhớ here’s a metaphor for the way an individual dwelling within the diaspora shapes their very own story composed of recollections and varied longings for residence. The exhibition explores diasporic experiences of communities who’ve usually been compelled by hostile circumstances to go away their fatherland in the hunt for a ‘higher’ residence. Stuart Corridor offers us with an essential immediate when speaking concerning the Caribbean diaspora: “How are we to conceptualize or think about id, distinction, and belongingness, after diaspora? Since “cultural id” carries so many overtones of important unity, primordial oneness, indivisibility, and sameness, how are we to “assume” identities inscribed inside relations of energy and constructed throughout distinction and disjuncture?”
Kimberly Nguyen, on metamorphosis, poem, audio recording, 2023, Set up view of the exhibition “Nhớ: Area Between One Finish and the Different”, Kunsthalle Bratislava, 2023, Picture: Adam Šakový
Upon coming into the exhibition house, the voice of poet Kimberly Nguyen contemplates what residence nation is: “how lovely a house. how lovely the nation that defies a boundary.” We’re reminded that house is greater than only a piece of land on this planet the place we have been born, it’s a feeling, it’s a sense of belonging, even a course of in transition, even after we cross borders…
For many of us, our most vivid household recollections are of household gatherings and celebrations. In her set up, Nhu Xuan Hua places on a marriage get together to recall all of those recollections. “Wedding ceremony Room” from the collection Hug of a swan, reminds us that usually our most particular recollections emerge after we get collectively, after we sit down and share a meal. The set up consisting of karaoke lights, a stage and meticulously set tables could be the proper backdrop for an incredible get together, however wait, the tables are halved, the cutlery and plates are folded. The scene is directly near actuality, but additionally by no means. It’s a quite surreal house. We’re challenged by our personal recollections; Nhu Xuan reminds us of how elusive our recollections are. Equally, Nhu Xuan’s Household Portrait, from the collection Tropism, penalties of a displaced reminiscence, depicts a household at a marriage the place the bride and groom and all the wedding ceremony company have blurred faces. They’re morphed into their environment. How can we reconstruct our recollections? Do they form who we’re? Or can we retain the emotions linked with moments quite than the precise particulars and details?
Nhu Xuan Hua, Wedding ceremony Room from Hug of a swan, set up with karaoke gentle, stage, pictures on titanium papers and metallic body, tables and chairs, glasses, folded cutlery and plates, 2016-2021, Set up view of the exhibition “Nhớ: Area Between One Finish and the Different”, Kunsthalle Bratislava, 2023, Picture: Adam Šakový
Nhu Xuan Hua, Wedding ceremony Room from Hug of a swan, set up with karaoke gentle, stage, pictures on titanium papers and metallic body, tables and chairs, glasses, folded cutlery and plates, 2016-2021, Set up view of the exhibition “Nhớ: Area Between One Finish and the Different”, Kunsthalle Bratislava, 2023, Picture: Adam Šakový
Nhu Xuan Hua, Wedding ceremony Room from Hug of a swan, set up with karaoke gentle, stage, pictures on titanium papers and metallic body, tables and chairs, glasses, folded cutlery and plates, 2016-2021, Set up view of the exhibition “Nhớ: Area Between One Finish and the Different”, Kunsthalle Bratislava, 2023, Picture: Adam Šakový
Nhu Xuan Hua, Wedding ceremony Room from Hug of a swan, set up with karaoke gentle, stage, pictures on titanium papers and metallic body, tables and chairs, glasses, folded cutlery and plates, 2016-2021, Set up view of the exhibition “Nhớ: Area Between One Finish and the Different”, Kunsthalle Bratislava, 2023, Picture: Adam Šakový
Nhu Xuan Hua, Wedding ceremony Room from Hug of a swan, set up with karaoke gentle, stage, pictures on titanium papers and metallic body, tables and chairs, glasses, folded cutlery and plates, 2016-2021, Set up view of the exhibition “Nhớ: Area Between One Finish and the Different”, Kunsthalle Bratislava, 2023, Picture: Adam Šakový
Nhu Xuan Hua, Wedding ceremony Room from Hug of a swan, set up with karaoke gentle, stage, pictures on titanium papers and metallic body, tables and chairs, glasses, folded cutlery and plates, 2016-2021, Set up view of the exhibition “Nhớ: Area Between One Finish and the Different”, Kunsthalle Bratislava, 2023, Picture: Adam Šakový
Nhu Xuan Hua, Wedding ceremony Room from Hug of a swan, set up with karaoke gentle, stage, pictures on titanium papers and metallic body, tables and chairs, glasses, folded cutlery and plates, 2016-2021, Set up view of the exhibition “Nhớ: Area Between One Finish and the Different”, Kunsthalle Bratislava, 2023, Picture: Adam Šakový
Nhu Xuan Hua, Household Portrait on the wedding ceremony – Archive from 12 months ’85 from Tropism collection, UV ink on Perspex, mounted on Dibond, aluminium field body, sculpted and varnished huge beech pedestal, design with Quentin Vuong, 2016-2021, Set up view of the exhibition “Nhớ: Area Between One Finish and the Different”, Kunsthalle Bratislava, 2023, Picture: Adam Šakový
In his video efficiency, entitled Efficiency with my father (II), Minh Thang Pham and his father discuss their relationship, which is affected by his son’s incapability to speak fluently in Vietnamese and his father’s lack of Czech. Within the video, they search for connections and methods to speak exterior of language. Are we solely capable of totally perceive one another by way of our means to talk the identical language? Or can we really feel a deep connection by way of gestures, physique language, eye contact, facial expressions and daily care and affection? Because the artist’s dad explains, it’s the tình cảm, the on a regular basis gestures of affection, that remind him of the love they share.
The kid-father relationship can also be the theme of the movie Love, Dad, which is introduced within the exhibition house A Black Field. It’s an animated documentary concerning the misplaced connection between a daughter and her father. Diana Nguyen was separated from her father for a 12 months as a toddler when he ended up in jail. Nevertheless, throughout this era, paradoxically, they developed a good nearer relationship, with the gap simply bridged by the letters they wrote to one another. Separation got here once more later in her life when her father left the household for good. The movie is a mechanism by way of which Nguyen copes and rediscovers the misplaced connection and love along with her father.
Minh Thang Pham, Efficiency with my father(II), video efficiency, 5:51, 2019, Set up view of the exhibition “Nhớ: Area Between One Finish and the Different”, Kunsthalle Bratislava, 2023, Picture: Adam Šakový
Minh Thang Pham, Efficiency with my father(II), video efficiency, 5:51, 2019, Set up view of the exhibition “Nhớ: Area Between One Finish and the Different”, Kunsthalle Bratislava, 2023, Picture: Adam Šakový
Diana Cam Van Nguyen, Love, Dad, movie, 12:46, 2021, Set up view of the exhibition “Nhớ: Area Between One Finish and the Different”, Kunsthalle Bratislava, 2023, Picture: Adam Šakový
Diana Cam Van Nguyen, Love, Dad, movie, 12:46, 2021, Set up view of the exhibition “Nhớ: Area Between One Finish and the Different”, Kunsthalle Bratislava, 2023, Picture: Adam Šakový
After the Fall of Saigon, the biggest migration of Vietnamese, the so-called “boat individuals,” got here to Europe, together with France, West Germany, and america. Maithu Bùi’s two channel video set up, entitled Mathuật – MMRBX, goals to disclose the troubled previous of survivor diasporas. “Mathuật” is a mix of the artist’s identify, Maithu, and the Vietnamese phrase for magic, ma thuật, whereas MMRBX is an acronym for the reminiscence field. Appearing as a reminiscence field, the video tells tales of Japanese occupation, American bombing, French colonial exploitation, and the intergovernmental settlement with the GDR. Crammed with recollections of colonization and decolonization processes, the video begins with a Vietnamese water puppet present. This historic technique of storytelling and dissemination of data is a superb software for preserving previous tales. Private recollections are combined with the collective historical past of transgenerational traumas, permitting a brand new narrative of the Vietnamese diaspora to take form.
This exhibition additionally encourages us to mirror on the truth that Slovakia is rather more multicultural and vibrant than we frequently assume. We frequently discuss with former socialist international locations as nationalist or xenophobic as a result of they’ve lived in isolation for therefore lengthy. However that’s merely not true. There may be an ‘usually missed circulation of individuals, items, information and capital that occurred between the state-socialist states and between these states and numerous creating international locations.’ Through the interval of state socialism, from the Fifties to the Nineteen Eighties, the mobility of college college students and migrant staff was an essential side of financial and political state-building in Central and Jap Europe. Practically 3,000 Vietnamese discovered a house in Slovakia and between 60,000 – 100,000 within the Czech Republic. Czechoslovakia supplied roughly 500 scholarships to college students from ‘creating international locations’ yearly, and amongst them, Vietnamese comprised the biggest group.
Maithu Bùi, Mathuật – MMRBX, two-channel video set up, 2022, Set up view of the exhibition “Nhớ: Area Between One Finish and the Different”, Kunsthalle Bratislava, 2023, Picture: Adam Šakový
Maithu Bùi, Mathuật – MMRBX, two-channel video set up, 2022, Set up view of the exhibition “Nhớ: Area Between One Finish and the Different”, Kunsthalle Bratislava, 2023, Picture: Adam Šakový
Kvet Nguyen’s work The Archive of Returns is an open archive of recollections of her household. This repository of recollections accommodates recollections captured by pictures of her dad and mom’ arrival to Slovakia. From the set up object you’ll be able to pull particular person archival or preserved pictures capturing photographs of on a regular basis life and household occasions. The field accommodates photographs (discovered, gathered or created by the artist), pictures from celebrations, household gatherings, and journeys. What you select to uncover and work together with from the collection of recollections is as much as you. Our reminiscence is a selective course of, filled with random processes and sophisticated overlaps with fabricated concepts. How can we archive our private tales and what’s price preserving?
Think about you might be solely 19 and you’ve got determined to go away your private home nation with one small bag and only a few items of clothes. In her ceramics, entitled New Hope, Quynh Trang Tran traces the story of the journey of her dad and mom as they emigrated from Vietnam to Czechoslovakia. Her purpose was to create an object that may evoke the advanced circumstances that accompanied the journey, with out information of language, cultural and political customs and with just a few of essentially the most fundamental items of clothes. Her mom was solely 19 years outdated and her father was 22. Each got here right here below completely different circumstances and in several years. They solely met as soon as right here, although they each got here from the identical village in Vietnam.
Kvet Nguyen, The Archive of Returns, set up, 2021 (courtesy of Regional Gallery of Advantageous Arts in Zlín), Set up view of the exhibition “Nhớ: Area Between One Finish and the Different”, Kunsthalle Bratislava, 2023, Picture: Adam Šakový
Kvet Nguyen, The Archive of Returns, set up, 2021 (courtesy of Regional Gallery of Advantageous Arts in Zlín), Set up view of the exhibition “Nhớ: Area Between One Finish and the Different”, Kunsthalle Bratislava, 2023, Picture: Adam Šakový
Kvet Nguyen, The Archive of Returns, set up, 2021 (courtesy of Regional Gallery of Advantageous Arts in Zlín), Set up view of the exhibition “Nhớ: Area Between One Finish and the Different”, Kunsthalle Bratislava, 2023, Picture: Adam Šakový
Quynh Trang Tran, New Hope, trousers 37 x 25 cm, t-shirts 30 x 25 cm, modelled ceramics, colored glazes, 2021, Set up view of the exhibition “Nhớ: Area Between One Finish and the Different”, Kunsthalle Bratislava, 2023, Picture: Adam Šakový
Anna Tran and Quynh Trang Tran, Set up view of the exhibition “Nhớ: Area Between One Finish and the Different”, Kunsthalle Bratislava, 2023, Picture: Adam Šakový
Anna Tran, Checkered Recollections (1) and (2), cloth, 2023, Set up view of the exhibition “Nhớ: Area Between One Finish and the Different”, Kunsthalle Bratislava, 2023, Picture: Adam Šakový
Anna Tran, Checkered Recollections (1) and (2), cloth, 2023, Set up view of the exhibition “Nhớ: Area Between One Finish and the Different”, Kunsthalle Bratislava, 2023, Picture: Adam Šakový
Anna Tran, Checkered Recollections (1) and (2), cloth, 2023, Set up view of the exhibition “Nhớ: Area Between One Finish and the Different”, Kunsthalle Bratislava, 2023, Picture: Adam Šakový
The widespread thread within the migrant story is transportation, shifting from one place to a different. Dressmaker Anna Tran works with the theme through the use of the ingredient of the checkered sample, which she took from the checkered plastic raffia luggage. For the artist, these luggage, related to migration, are the image of recollections of her childhood, of the nomadic lifestyle that accompanied her childhood in Moravia. Within the luggage her and her mom carried not solely their private belongings, but additionally gadgets on the market, which later grew to become their supply of earnings. Anna’s summary set up, created particularly for this exhibition, within the form of a cloud, is an instrument of transformation again in time, into her circle of relatives story. After the exhibition, Anna will use the material for her new style assortment.
I think about I’m 25 and I’m leaving my entire household behind. I’m going to a spot the place there are individuals I’ve known as Westerners for years, a important time period for individuals who destroyed my homeland. They’ve executed it repeatedly and now I’m going to change into one in every of them. Not less than I’ll attempt to be. They’re all relying on me. I’m the chosen one of many household who has been given the privilege to go away, and that is the primary time I’ve recognized the sensation of privilege. I most likely would have stayed, too, if it weren’t for the poverty. We’d have sufficient of these rice paddies and small crab searching if it wasn’t all collapsing. There are too many mouths to feed. That leaves the accountability on me.
I could also be going to a developed a part of the world, however I’m going to stay just like the lowest class to ship cash residence. There’s much more of it wanted there. I heard about Czechoslovakia on the information. It’s supposedly a pleasant nation with good ladies, so says a neighbour who gossips all around the village. I additionally depart my very own spouse and first-born daughter, who doesn’t know me as a result of she was born in the course of the Sino-Vietnamese Struggle, wherein I fought. I’m forsaking a language that was most likely not meant for me. My spouse believes in future, however this Vietnamese one didn’t work out for us. I don’t know the way I’ll be taught one other language that breaks my coronary heart with its hardness and unfamiliarity.
I’ll overlook the contortions of my very own lineage, however I received’t even understand it. I break all friendships. It’s as if I’m erasing my previous. I commerce my very own life for another person’s. It appears to me sweetly distant. Will it nonetheless be me? The unknown and the unusual are my new residence. And at any time when I return, I would be the one who left.*
In Vietnamese, the phrase for lacking somebody and remembering them is similar: nhớ. Generally, whenever you ask me over the cellphone, Con nhớ mẹ không? I flintch, considering you meant, Do you bear in mind me?
I miss you greater than I bear in mind you.
Corridor claims that the sense of a cultural id, custom, its reality to its origins, this “authenticity” is a fantasy – “with all the actual energy that our governing myths carry to form our imaginaries, influence our actions, give that means to our lives, and make sense of our historical past.” On this world of multiculturalism and liquid modernity, all of us have some sense of diaspora inside us. “That is the acquainted, deeply fashionable, sense of dislocation which—it in-creasingly seems—we would not have to journey far to expertise. Maybe we’re all, in fashionable instances—aſter the Fall, so to talk—what the thinker Heidegger known as “Unheimlichkeit”: actually, “not-at-home.” Within the context of former socialist international locations, the Vietnamese group is taken into account an “unintended diaspora”, “these college students, trainees and staff who have been anticipated to return residence.”
Set up view of the exhibition “Nhớ: Area Between One Finish and the Different”, Kunsthalle Bratislava, 2023, Picture: Adam Šakový
Set up view of the exhibition “Nhớ: Area Between One Finish and the Different”, Kunsthalle Bratislava, 2023, Picture: Adam Šakový
Set up view of the exhibition “Nhớ: Area Between One Finish and the Different”, Kunsthalle Bratislava, 2023, Picture: Adam Šakový
Anna Tran, Checkered Recollections (1) and (2), cloth, 2023, Set up view of the exhibition “Nhớ: Area Between One Finish and the Different”, Kunsthalle Bratislava, 2023, Picture: Adam Šakový
The road between the idea of 1 true residence and nationalism may be very skinny. Corridor reminds us that that is exactly the problem, that we can’t stay with out hope, however on the similar time there’s a drawback after we take it too actually. “It’s, aſter all, exactly this unique conception of “homeland” that led the Serbs to refuse to share their territory—as they’ve executed for hundreds of years—with their Muslim neighbors in Bosnia and justified ethnic cleaning in Kosovo. It’s a model of this conception of the Jewish diaspora, and its prophesied “return” to Israel, that’s the supply of Israel’s quarrel [sic] with its Center Jap neighbors, for which the Palestinian individuals have paid so dearly and, paradoxically, by expulsion from what can also be, aſter all, their homeland.”
We, the second era of the Vietnamese diaspora, have been within the West since beginning or early maturity. We’re the kids of those that got here right here however weren’t born right here. This era is the era that receives a lot of the legacy of intergenerational trauma. The difficult feelings of uncertainty and the disconnectedness of two worlds. Like our dad and mom, we ask ourselves the questions “what wouldn’t it have been like if we had stayed in Vietnam?” However on the similar time, in contrast to them, we’re free from the direct affect of political occasions in Vietnam. This hybrid place drives us to grasp our roots – all of the extra so when they’re uprooted and planted in a brand new land. It permits us to function on the margins, to steadiness and grasp the ambiguous tendencies of a blended id.
The house between one finish and the opposite. We’re like consistently oscillating molecules that encounter limits but additionally openness in a brand new land. They’re bumps within the contrasts now we have been introduced up on. Is there a proper reply in fluidity? How does integration and assimilation enter into the method of recognition? The place does our reminiscence finish and one other one begins?*
Maybe we will hand over altogether or quite broaden the thought of residence. Simply as Sophie Lewis teaches us to “abolish the household,” we should always abandon the thought of homeland. To not lose one thing, however to broaden it broadly. House could be a difficult, multi-layered, intricate sense of belonging to this world with overlapping influences, languages and recollections. The 2 curators of this exhibition, one born to Vietnamese dad and mom in Slovakia, the opposite a Slovak who spent her whole maturity exterior of Slovakia and utterly misplaced her sense of “homeland”, invite you to ponder the theme of belonging and residential.
A stroke on the cheek for a re-membering fight towards forgetfulness.
By exposing all of this I’m speaking to my father and I’m holding the hand of my mom.
With the numerous languages that I’ve been given to talk.
Whether or not out loud or in silence More often than not in silence.
Denisa Tomková
*Kvet Nguyen, a few of these excerpts will seem within the upcoming Kvet’s e book (N Press, 2024)
Kvet Nguyen, 2021. Is the sting of the world a spot from which to talk the world?
Stuart Corridor in Catherine Corridor and Invoice Schwarz (eds). 2018. Stuart Corridor: Important Essays, Identification and Diaspora. Quantity 2. Duke College Press, p.208.
Alena Alamgir. “Mobility: Training and Labour” in James Mark and Paul Betts (eds). 2022. Socialism Goes International. The Soviet Union and Jap Europe within the Age of Decolonisation, p. 290-291.
Ibid, p. 312.
They have been already utilized by different artists from the area of Central-Jap Europe, e.g.: Yulia Kostereva, Yuriy Kruchak and Ghenadie Popescu. See: Amy Bryzgel. 2016. “Road attraction: a decade of socially engaged efficiency artwork from the previous East” in New East Digital Archive: https://www.new-east-archive.org/articles/present/5393/performance-participatory-art-new-east
Ocean Vuong. 2019. On Earth We’re Briefly Attractive: A Novel. Classic. Penguin Press, p. 186.
Stuart Corridor. 2018, p. 209.
Zigmund Bauman. Liquid Modernity. Polity Press. 2013.
Corridor, p. 208.
Christina Schwenkel. 2017. “Vietnamese in Central Europe: An Unintended Diaspora” in Journal of Vietnamese Research (2017) 12(1): 1–9, p. 2.
Stuart Corridor, 2018, p. 210.
Sophie Lewis. 2022. Abolish the Household: A Manifesto for Care and Liberation. Verso.
Nhu Xuan Hua: https://huismarseille.nl/en/exhibitions/nhu-xuan-hua/