Nhớ: Space Between One End and the Other

This is the first exhibition of art of the Vietnamese diaspora in Slovakia. It is a sensory space and an invitation to dialogue, where personal memories can be shared and (re)discovered. The space contains words, both written and spoken. It contains stories, both told and silenced. The design of the space references the Vietnamese tone marks that indicate the six different tones of the Vietnamese language, a very subtle intervention into the space, but it’s the details that count when we want to communicate, connect, and share stories with others. It is a space where ideas of home can grow and where histories can be told, both personal ones and national ones, those cruel ones of war and forced migration. This exhibition, while basing its examples and stories on the second generation of the Vietnamese diaspora, wants to tell a more complex story about identity, culture, belonging, and how we are shaped and influenced by our families, as well as the society around us. It is a story about a heterogeneous group of the Vietnamese diaspora with different histories and contexts. The socialist experience of the Vietnamese in Czechoslovakia was different than in France, Germany or the US. While the exhibition does not aim to retell the story of French colonization, the Vietnam War, or American involvement in Vietnam, all of these events are nevertheless intertwined in the (hi)stories, personal family memories, and transgenerational traumas of the exhibiting artists. There are glimpses of trauma and loss in the works on display, but what unites these works overall, and what this exhibition focuses on, is our relationship to families. Home can be a complicated, multi-layered, intricate sense of belonging to this world with overlapping influences, languages and memories. The two curators of this exhibition, one born to Vietnamese parents in Slovakia, the other a Slovak who spent her entire adulthood outside of Slovakia and completely lost her sense of “homeland”, invite you to contemplate the theme of belonging and home.