6 ½ Weeks – Ngoc Nau

The Vietnamese media artist Ngoc Nau (*1989) is this year's fellow of the New Folkwang Residence. The associated exhibition at Museum Folkwang shows two works created during her five-month stay in Essen.
In Ngoc Nau's video-based collages, documentary material meets computer-generated scenes and figures with a video game aesthetic, which place what is depicted in a fictional present. The starting point for most of her works is her homeland, the province of Thái Nguyên in the mountainous north-east of Vietnam, which has developed from an agricultural region into a centre of the metal industry and electronics in recent decades. Her works locate Vietnam's rich cultural heritage in a system driven by capitalist progress.
The 3-channel installation All in Good Time (2024) documents the preparations for a ceremony of the Đạo Mẫu, a Vietnamese folk religion of the mother goddess, which is performed exclusively by women. Ngoc Nau's films, which are accompanied by captivating sounds, aim – contrary to Vietnam's ideological politics – not to lose sight of their own roots and values. Having grown up in a patriarchal society and as a witness to domestic violence, she always places women at the centre of her work. Her empathy and interest in the social challenges faced by women is also reflected in the other works in the exhibition: for No Mud, No Lotus (2024), she interviewed four women from the Vietnamese diaspora in Germany. On the intimate surface of smartphone screens, she combines stories of discrimination, child abduction and social exclusion with the aesthetics of make-up and cooking tutorials to give the interviewees their safe space.

Ngoc Nau studied painting and drawing at the Hanoi College of Fine Arts before completing her master's degree in art history and criticism at the Vietnam University of Fine Arts in Hanoi in 2013. Today, the artist lives and works in Hanoi and Thái Nguyên. In 2023 she was honoured with the Mentorship: Moving Narratives Cycle 1 from the Prince Claus Funding and British Council, and in 2015 she was selected for the Culture Development and Exchange Fund (CDEF) with her project The Land of Energy. Her works have been shown at the Gangwon International Triennale (2024), Documenta 15 (2022), Art Basel Hong Kong (2023), Thailand Biennale (2021), Singapore Biennale (2019) and the Accès Asie festival in Montreal (2016), among others. In 2024 she is a fellow of the New Folkwang Residence in Essen.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a publication with a text by Katrin Bauer.