Cultural Identity and Otherness
Abstract
Kvet Nguyen (Hoa Nguyen Thi) – born 1995. She completed her master’s degree in photography at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Bratislava. Her bachelor’s thesis received the second-place award at the World Biennial of Student Photography in 2019, and in the same year this work was exhibited at the fjúžn Festival. In 2018, she was a finalist in SLOVAK PRESS PHOTO in the category for students and young photographers under the age of 26. She completed study stays at Plymouth College of Art in England and the prestigious Royal Academy of Art in Netherlands. Her works have been exhibited both in Slovakia – OFF Festival (2017, 2020), in the Nitra Gallery (2020), in Banská Štiavnica (2020), in Artapiešťany (2020), and abroad – in the Netherlands as part of a collective exhibition (2020), in Poland in Galeria Promocyjna, Krakow (2017) and at the presentation of photo books in Poznań (2017), in France at LIVRE PARIS (2019), in Belgrade, Serbia at a group exhibition (2019). Kvet Nguyen deals with the themes of otherness and identity not only in her art projects, but also tries to talk about it outright and open a discussion in interviews or other platforms. For example, in 2018, she prepared, together with the newspaper Denník N, a report on the story of the Vietnamese in Slovakia, which was recently awarded a Journalist Award (Novinárska cena). Kvet Nguyen also collaborates with artists from other disciplines. Together with Kristína Uličná she created the ADP project and subsequently the book ADP – a critique of the condition of boarding houses. The book was a finalist for the National Design Award in 2018 (Národná cena za dizajn). Together with Lucia Gamanová, Oleksandra Bakushina, Paula Malinowská and Eva Takácsová, she founded the civic association “päť a pól”, which is covered by the project VŠVU DIARY (DIÁR VŠVU). The aim of the civic association is to support young artists and thus also to support cultural awareness in Slovakia.
Key words
Identity. Migration. Other-ness. Personal history. Postcolonial. Slovak-vietnamese.
NGUYEN, K.: Cultural Identity and Otherness. In European Journal of Media, Art and Photography, 2021, Vol. 9, No. 2, pp. 38-69, ISSN 1339-4940.