23. 8. 2024 – 25. 10. 2024, opening 22. 8. 2024 at 19h
Memory is changeable, selective and always at risk of being forgotten. As the memory of many people has been erased and neglected due to the horrors of conflict, imperialism and war, in response many contemporary artists challenge collective amnesia by consciously working with sites of memory. Archives have been seen as tools for empowerment through engagement of community archives (Caswell 2021), and as ‘liberatory memory work’ (Gould and Harris 2014) when drawing on the experiences of post-conflict societies. Similarly, this exhibition aims to challenge forgetting and selective memory in the post-socialist Czech and Slovak context, and to raise the question of whose stories are included in official archives and collective memory, and why? How does the figure of the artist-as-archivist (Foster 2004) operate in the local contemporary art history?
The Czechoslovak-Vietnamese Labour Exchange, from 1967, was based on ‘socialist economic assistance’ and from the mid-1970s was also intended to serve the interests and needs of Czechoslovak companies (Alamgir 2014). While working for Pamäť národa (the Memory of the Nation), Quynh Trang Tran noticed that although being one of the most extensive collections of memoirs by witnesses in Europe, it did not contain many Vietnamese stories. Hence, through her own research of family archives, Quynh Trang depicts her parents’ migration to Czechoslovakia in the ceramic work New Hope (2021), which shows all the pieces of clothing that the artist’s mother was able to pack on her journey to Czechoslovakia. The video also preserves memories of Quynh Trang’s grandmother, who stayed in Vietnam when the artist’s mother emigrated to Czechoslovakia in 1986. In her work, Quynh Trang excavates forgotten stories and family archives to combat the forgetting of her family’s past. Kvet Nguyen’s Leftover bodies* depicts the stories of the very migrants from Vietnam who came to Czechoslovakia in the 1970s and 80s. From the community archive of the local Slovak language school for migrants in Sološnica, Kvet collects memories and gives voice to Vietnamese exchange workers and adds their stories to the collective memory of Czechoslovak history. The voices of singing Vietnamese migrant workers (found in forgotten television archives) resonate in the exhibition space like materialized shadows of the past. After the fall of socialism, the Vietnamese were to work until the expiry of the existing contracts and gradually leave Czechoslovakia by 1995. In the post-socialist context of the 1990s, solidarity was replaced by racializing discourses and increased skinhead attacks, which this work depicts through excerpts from the contemporary press. Kvet’s project speaks exactly about these ‘leftover bodies’, whose stories are often omitted from collective memory and official Czechoslovak archives.
In 2004, Hal Foster spoke of ‘an archival impulse’ as a new tendency in contemporary art and described the shift from ‘excavation sites’ into ‘construction sites’ and highlighted the potential of moving away from melancholic and only traumatic histories into building new sites of memory. By working with family (Quynh Trang Tran) and diasporic community archives (Kvet Nguyen), this exhibition reconstructs the lost memories, experiences, and stories of the Vietnamese diaspora in the Czech Republic and Slovakia, contributing to a more nuanced and heterogeneous collective memory. These ‘acts of memory’ challenge ‘amnesia and a politically suffocating environment’ and are essential like air, ‘to keep us breathing’. (Huyseen 2022: 19)
Kvet Nguyen (Hoa Nguyen Thi) is a visual artist and is currently a PhD candidate at the Department of Photography and New Media (Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Bratislava). She is a laureate of the Oskár Čepan Award 2024. She regularly exhibits in Europe, and also beyond, having shown work in Canada and Vietnam. Kvet is also actively engaged in the themes of otherness and identity outside of her artistic projects. For example, in 2018, together with reporters from Denník N, she prepared a report about the Vietnamese in Slovakia, which was awarded the Journalism Award. She is the author of the book Všetko, čo nás spája (Everything That Connects Us, 2024) depicting the story of her family’s migration and her growing up as a Slovak-Vietnamese. Her work Archive of returns (2021) is part of the collection at the Regional Gallery of Fine Art in Zlín (CZ).
Quynh Trang Tran is a graduate of the Ceramics and Porcelain studio at the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague. In her practice, she likes to combine ceramics and new media. Through her work experience from the glass and ceramics collection at the Museum of Decorative Arts in Prague, Quynh Trang has gained a unique insight into the history of ceramic production in Bohemia. She created a ceramic monument, Tribute to Helena Johnová, which was installed in 2022 in the park near E. Beneš Avenue in Soběslav. Her work is represented in the collection of the permanent exhibition of the Moravian Gallery – Museum of Decorative Arts in Brno.
Denisa Tomková, PhD, is an assistant professor at the Department of Theory of Art and Artworks at the Faculty of Humanities, Charles University in Prague. Her monograph Empowering Aesthetics. Contemporary Art from Post-Socialist Central Europe is forthcoming from Bloomsbury (2025).
exhibitors: Kvet Nguyen & Quynh Trang Tran
curator: Denisa Tomková
Bibliography
Alamgir, A. (2014), ‘Recalcitrant Women: Internationalism and the Redefinition of Welfare Limits in the Czechoslovak-Vietnamese Labor Exchange Program’, Slavic Review, 73(1), pp. 133–155.
Caswell, M. (2021), Urgent Archives. Enacting Liberatory Memory Work, Routledge.
Foster, H. (2004). ‘An Archival Impulse’ in October, Vol. 110, pp. 3-22.
Gould, C. and Harris, V. (2014), Memory for Justice in Nelson Mandela Foundation, available online: https://www.nelsonmandela.org/uploads/files/MEMORY_FOR_JUSTICE_2014v2.pdf
Huyssen, A. (2022) Memory Art in the Contemporary World. Confronting Violence in the Global South, Lund Humphries.*Partridge, D. (2012), Hypersexuality and Headscarves: Race, Sex and Citizenship in the New Germany, Indiana University Press, in Schwenkel, C. (2019), ‘Vietnamese in Central Europe: An Unintended Diaspora,’ Journal of Vietnamese Studies 12, no. 1, pp. 1-9.
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The project is realised with the financial support of the Capital City of Prague. Prague, the Prague 3 Municipal District, the Ministry of Culture and the State Culture Fund of the Czech Republic. Thank you for your support.
