MAP 2023 – The Alternative Mobility

Mobility is a category that covers material and spiritual life. It is an antithesis of the state of crisis, chaos, distances and gaps that has been created by the the pandemic. Mobility has transformed the world in recent times. Moreover, mobility is not just about how to get from A to B or whether a cargo bike is more ecological. What should be moved at all and why? How can movement be expressed? What roles do slowness and speed play? To explore the dimensions of these questions, curators and artists of MAP will develop different ideas based on their own perception and perspective, experience and artistic language to develop into experimental art programs, artworks or performance during the project period.

MAP – Month of Art Practice – is an event format of Heritage Space, an independent art venue in Hanoi, Vietnam and has taken place annually since 2015. As in a post-graduate training, established international artists and curators are brought into exchange with alumnae of Vietnamese art schools. As part of the collaborative research project BreGoS, the HfK has the work package „Sharing Ecologies“ and a sub-project of this is dedicated to artistic perspectives on mobility. We are using this for a collaboration with Heritage Space and will conduct MAP 2023 with two working groups in Hanoi and Bremen in parallel, exchanging ideas online, with each developing an exhibition with new artistic works.

At HfK, the project will bring together 4 established artists along with 6 higher semester students from the Faculty of Art and Design. In Hanoi, 12 participants from Korea, Japan, India, Switzerland and Vietnam will come together. In August and September there will be first online meetings and in October and November the working weeks will take place. The exhibitions will open in parallel in Hanoi and Bremen (on the Dauerwelle) on 24.11.2023. A publication will be published in the following of the exhibition.

Invited artists in Bremen are:

Sylbee Kim is a South Korean video artist based in Berlin since 2005. Kim’s video installations experiment with digital and physical making processes to imagine sociopolitical grounds for less destructive ways of living and dying. Kim’s display structures and handling of audio-visual languages propose pluralistic perception of our reality.

Quỳnh Lâm is from Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam and active all over the world. She is Fulbright scholar with a background in architecture, working on research-based and archival projects.

Felix Dreesen examined HfK in 2026. For several years he has been working with a focus on human-environment relations and on the theme of movement and the encounter of body/machine and matter. In the process, he has traveled in art contexts and actions on land, water, and air, on foot, on a bicycle, on a self-built floating platform and in a glider.

Kayle Brandon lives in Bristol, UK and works in social contexts often in collaboration with others. Her projects are process led, with links to activism, punk and open source topics. Interests include decolonisation, cooperative movements, land, ecology,urbanism and peoples relationships to nature.

During MAP, the artists will develop their projects at the HfK and will be in close exchange with the other participants. All discussions and events will take place in English or will be translated into English. It is an opportunity for HfK students to realize own artwork, collaborate with professional artists and curators and to network internationally.

The project is led by Anh-Tuan Nguyen (Heritage Space) and Ingo Vetter (HfK).