Kvet Nguyen: Till the Water Meets the Shore
We warmly invite you to the opening of the exhibition Kvet Nguyen: Until Water Washes Away the Shore, which will take place on Wednesday, June 18 at 6:00 PM at the Bratislava City Gallery (Mirbach Palace). The exhibition developed gradually during the artist’s time at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Bratislava (VŠVU), and it offers her a chance to share what she has been deeply engaged with in recent years – archives, potential histories, and that which remains even as things disappear.
Where:
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Mirbach Palace – Bratislava City Gallery
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Františkánske námestie 416/11, 811 01 Bratislava–Old Town
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When:
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Opening: June 18, 2025 at 6:00 PM
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Exhibition Duration: June 18, 2025 – November 23, 2025
More info
About the Artist and the Exhibition
This large monographic exhibition presents the latest work of Kvet Nguyen. It is conceived as a visual reading of chapters from the story of the Vietnamese diaspora in the territory of former Czechoslovakia.
From post-war migration during socialist internationalism, through the turning point of the Velvet Revolution, up to the present day. Through her critical and poetic engagement with archives, Nguyen creates space for reviving silenced voices and narratives.
In the object installation *Land Records* (2025), Nguyen poetically disrupts space-time to reinterpret the myth of the origin of her ancestors’ land through the lens of a long history of colonial violence. Its later consequences and expressions are also addressed in her newly created film *The Borders of Our Pain* (2025), which through critical fabulation reflects the existential feelings and experiences of the second generation of the Slovak-Vietnamese community in Slovakia. The film touches on themes of home and belonging, and indirectly appeals to the fading capacity for human empathy.
Nguyen’s work often engages with textual and visual materials found in official period state archives and media, strongly infused with racist and xenophobic narratives. This material, which challenges the false declaration of colonial innocence in post-socialist Central European countries, becomes a point of departure for her. By searching for and presenting suppressed voices, she pays tribute to the resilience of marginalized communities and draws attention to the strength and necessity of both collective and individual resistance.
The creative impulse for Kvet Nguyen is the search for a visual language capable of capturing the tension of collective trauma and transforming this experience into a vision of a better, more just future. Nguyen consciously creates space for dreaming, hope, and expressing desires that may serve as a catalyst for change.
This extensive solo presentation connects works from recent years with new pieces created specifically for the exhibition, including the docu-fiction film *The Borders of Our Pain* (2025). The exhibition also features voices and words of educator Omar Beiruti, multidisciplinary artist Shivone Dominguez Blaščíková, artivist Kim Kony, and musician Adela Mede. A special place will be dedicated to a series of staged portraits of members of the Vietnamese and Cuban diaspora in 1980s Czechoslovakia, in iconic photographs by Libuše Jarcovjáková.
KVET NGUYEN
(Hoa Nguyen Thi, *1995 Nové Zámky, SK)
Kvet Nguyen is a visual artist and a doctoral student at the Department of Photography and New Media at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Bratislava. In her multidisciplinary work, she primarily deals with the theme of otherness in the context of post-socialist Central and Eastern European countries and broader geopolitical relations. Using autoethnographic theory, she reflects on questions of dual cultural identity through the lenses of memory, migration, exile, and longing. Nguyen was awarded the Oskár Čepan Award in 2024 (together with Svetlana Fialová, Paula Malinowska, and Tomáš Moravanský), and in the same year, she completed a residency at the Delfina Foundation in London. She is the author of the autobiographical essay *Everything That Connects Us* (2024). Her recent solo and group projects were presented at Gallery 35m2 (Prague, CZ), tranzit.sk (Bratislava, SK), The Július Koller Society (Bratislava, SK), Kunsthalle Bratislava (SK), VCCA (Hanoi, VN), and Center A (Vancouver, CA).