Kvet Nguyen
Slovak-vietnamese artist
July, 1900

Leftover bodies* (2024)

“In her research Leftover Bodies (2024), Kvet Nguyen focuses on the public discourse used in the media when describing the Vietnamese community living in Slovakia after the end of socialism and investigates the legacy of socialist internationalism with its premise of equality and anti-racism. Based on the community archives of Vietnamese students who came to Czechoslovakia as part of internationalist cooperation in the 1970s and 1980s, the artist, in a new installation that contributes to her long-term research in these archives, contrasts the warm familiarity between the local community and the students in an interpersonal exchange of letters with the overtly racist discourse about the Vietnamese community in the media in the 1990s.” – curator Iva Kovać

 

*term used by Damani J. Partridge, Hypersexuality and Headscarves: Race, Sex and Citizenship in the New Germany (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012),

Copyright © 2021 KVET NGUYEN. All rights reserved.