12th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art

KW Institute for Contemporary Art 

Auguststraße 69, 10117 Berlin

Not wheelchair accessible

German

With: Duc Vu Manh, Maithu Bùi, Minh Duc Pham, Minh Thu Tran, Vanessa Vu

In collaboration with the Việt-German podcast Rice and Shine

Rice and Shine was founded in 2018 by journalists Minh Thu Tran and Vanessa Vu. Both conceive, host, and produce the podcast. Linh Tran joined the team from April 2019 to December 2020. She assisted in editorial, editing, and community outreach.

In Germany, Vietnamese people are considered to be „well integrated,“ „quiet,“ and „invisible.“ They are known from flower boutiques, Asian restaurants, Asian markets, Spätis, nail salons, or fruit and vegetable stores. But Vietnamese people in Germany are so much more than that. They also shape contemporary art, for example, as can be seen at the 12th Berlin Biennale. From the second generation of Vietnamese migrants (former contract workers in the GDR), Maithu Bùi and Minh Duc Pham talk about their personal life and experiences as artists, as well as about their artistic practice as Việt-German artists. Through the works, artistically, poetically, and philosophically, those invisible structures and systems in the postcolonial age are revealed and made visible. Marginal perspectives have a claim to take up space in institutional space. We make our voices heard, speak up, and tell our story.

Duc Vu Manh works and lives in Berlin. During his BA degree in art education extracurricular at the University of Leipzig, he found his way into curation and developed his own artistic practice. He is currently pursuing his MA at the Alice Salomon University of Applied Sciences Berlin in Practice Research in Social Work and Pedagogy. He views art as a form of practice. He says, art is a medium through which we can experience, express, share, educate, nurture, heal, or protest. It is the foundation of encounters that enables storytelling, in terms of community, empowerment, and recognition of diverse perspectives.

Maithu Bùi is a Việt-German artist. Bùi is interested in context sensitivity, memory cultures, belief systems, educational policy, and the sustainable responsibility of science and technology. She studied philosophy of language and logic at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich and has been studying experimental media at Universität der Künste Berlin in Hito Steyerl’s Lensbased Class since 2017. Bùi is co-founder of the curatorial research collective Curating through Conflict with Care (CCC). She works at the Gesellschaft für Informatik e. V. in the areas of art, sustainability, and computer science education.

Minh Duc Pham is a visual artist and performer. His artistic practice is grounded in the need and search for a new self-understanding. This subversive act, accompanied by care, is both the goal and the path of an urgent creative will for change, self-empowerment, and the desire for self-determined social mobility. Pham’s artistic positions can be viewed as individual works, but are conceived as successive cycles.

Minh Thu Tran was born in 1993 in Illertissen, in the Swabian part of Bavaria. As a teenager, she tried her foot at school and local politics, then found a safer space at the local newspaper and community radio. Fittingly, she then studied political science and communications in Munich and Aix-en-Provence, and later did her MA journalism in Munich. She then fell in love with ugly Cologne and has since been working there as a freelance journalist, mostly for Deutschlandfunk Nova and WDR COSMO. For her radio feature about former child soldiers, Minh Thu Tran received, among others, the media prize of Kindernothilfe. 

Vanessa Vu was born and raised in southeastern Bavaria in 1991. Vanessa Vu spent her childhood in front of the TV, her youth in front of the computer, in between going to the public library. She then studied ethnology and law in Munich, Paris, and London, did internships in Brussels and Hanoi, first became involved in nature conservation, then in human rights, and finally became a storyteller. She is currently working in Berlin as an editor in the X department of ZEIT ONLINE. Vanessa Vu has received the Helmut Schmidt Prize and the Theodor Wolff Prize, among others, for her work.

This event is exclusively for a BIPoC audience. Please register via mediation@berlinbiennale.de. The number of participants is limited. Participation is only possible with a confirmation email.