Till the Water Meets the Shore

In the object installation Land Records (2025), Nguyễn uses poetic disruption of time and space to transform the myth of the creation of her ancestors' land through the perspective of a long history of colonial violence – the consequences and manifestations of which are also examined in the newly released film The Limits of Our Pain (2025), that uses critical fiction to consider the existential feelings and experiences of the second generation Slovak–Vietnamese community in Slovakia. The film touches on themes of home and belonging, while indirectly appealing to the fading human capacity for empathy.

Nguyễn's work often alludes to textual and visual content from historical state archives and media, material strongly coloured by racist and xenophobic narratives. This documentation, which casts doubt on false declarations of colonial innocence from post-socialist countries in the Central European region, serves as her springboard. Through seeking out and giving voice to the suppressed, she honours the resilience of marginalised communities and draws our attention to the power and necessity of collective and individual resistance.

Kvet Nguyễn's creative impulse is to discover a visual language that can capture the tension of collective trauma and transform this experience into an image of a better, fairer future. Nguyễn systematically seeks out and creates space for dreams, hopes, and expressions of desire that could serve as a catalyst for change.

This comprehensive solo exhibition connects her recent work with new elements created specifically for the event, including the semi-autobiographical docu-fiction film The Limits of Our Pain (2025). The exhibition also features the voices and words of educator Omar Beiruti, multidisciplinary artist Shivone Dominguez Blaščíková, artivist Denie Kim Kony, and musician Adela Mede. A special section will be dedicated to a series of staged portraits of members of the Vietnamese and Cuban diaspora in the Czech Republic during the 1980s as captured in iconic photographs by Libuše Jarcovjáková.

KVET NGUYỄN (Hoa Nguyễn Thị, born 1995 in Nové Zámky, Slovakia) is a visual artist and PhD student at the Department of Photography and New Media at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Bratislava. Her multidisciplinary work primarily explores the theme of otherness in the context of post-socialist countries in Central and Eastern Europe, as well as in broader geopolitical relations. Using autoethnographic theory, she reflects on issues of dual cultural identity through the categories of memory, migration, exile, and longing. Nguyễn won the Oskár Čepan Award 2024 (together with Svetlana Fialová, Paula Malinowska, and Tomáš Moravanský) and completed a residency at the Delfina Foundation in London in 2024. She is author of the autobiographical essay Everything That Connects Us (2024). Her most recent solo and group projects have been showcased at Galerie 35m2 (Prague, CZ), tranzit.sk (Bratislava, SK), The Július Koller Society (Bratislava, SK), Kunsthalle Bratislava (SK), VCCA (Hanoi, VN), and Center A (Vancouver, CA).