chạm-nảy: 01 | Performance Workshop Series by Lem TragNguyen

09 am – 12 pm, 28 – 30 May 2025
APD Center for Art Patronage and Development
No. 1 Lương Yên, Bạch Đằng, Hai Bà Trưng, Hà Nội
Registration link

From the organizer:

chạm-nảy: 01 is a performance-based workshop emerging from a critical inquiry into presence and embodiment in contemporary society.

In an age governed by algorithmic logics, accelerated urbanization, and ephemeral visual culture, the body risks becoming estranged not only from nature and community but from itself. Once a foundational site of perception and cognition, the body is often reduced to a performative surface, a locus for self-presentation rather than a lived, thinking subject.

This condition is compounded within specific cultural-historical contexts marked by ruptures: Confucian legacies, colonial histories, authoritarian regimes, and postcolonial aftershocks. These layered fractures exist without a sustaining indigenous philosophical framework for somatic reflection or critical self-engagement. Thus, returning to the body is never merely individual; it is a socio-political gesture that challenges dominant modes of disconnection. It is a call to re-sensitize our capacities for presence, affect, and relationality beyond the constraints of spectacle and survival strategies.

chạm-nảy: 01 arises as a responsive praxis. Across three days of embodied exploration and dialogical exchange, participants are invited to suspend habitual performative roles and fixed choreographies. The workshop foregrounds pre-linguistic, visceral movement as a modality for reconfiguring self-awareness and collective attunement.
The workshop is open to participants aged 16 and above, welcoming those with varying levels of experience, from seasoned practitioners to complete beginners in performance. Each workshop session is limited to a maximum of 12 practitioners to ensure a trustworthy, intimate, and personalized interactive space.

Program schedule:
09 am – 12 pm | Wednesday May 28, 2025 Session 1: Body and Space
09 am – 12 pm | Thursday May 29, 2025 Session 2: Body and Itself
09 am – 12 pm | Friday May 30, 2025 Session 3: Body and Time

Lem TragNguyen is a visual artist born in Germany and raised between Vietnam and Germany, whose work embodies the cultural interplay between East and West. Her artistic practice is rooted in a deep exploration of origin and belonging in a postcolonial context, where time, the body, and memory are in continuous flux.

Lem’s recent projects revolve around embodied memory and intergenerational care, seeking ways to transmit memory beyond textual discourse and official archival systems. She often works with domestic materials, which she transforms through acts of manipulation and performance. These materials gradually transcend their personal or local contexts, becoming conduits for collective memory and emotional resonance across generations. Her work interrogates the fluidity of identity within postcolonial realities, proposing that identity is never fixed but continuously shaped by contact, movement, and time.

Lem studied in an MFA program focusing on the body, theory, and poetics in performance art. Her works have been presented in various exhibitions and art festivals, including: IN:ACT Performance Art Festival (Hanoi, Vietnam, 2017); the 20+ Anniversary Program of Nhà Sàn Studio (Vietnam, 2018); Confusion is Chaos Buried by Tranzit (Prague, Czech Republic, 2019); Wuwei Performance Series (Singapore, 2020); Month of Art Practice MAP (Vietnam, 2020, 2021); the 4th Industrial Art Biennial Istria (Croatia, 2023); Documenta 15 (Kassel) as a member of Nhasan Collective; and Spacedumpling: Eleven-Day Kitchen Celebration at ifa Galerie Stuttgart (Germany, 2024).

Alongside her artistic practice, Lem is also active as a curator. Most recently, she curated a film screening program centered on the stories of the Vietnamese diaspora at the Linden Museum (Stuttgart, Germany, 2024), and co-led a workshop at Schwules Museum (Berlin, Germany, 2025).

In 2021, she founded Hay Là—an independent platform focusing on performance art in Vietnam.

Hay Là is a platform dedicated to Vietnamese Performance Art, founded in 2021 by artist Lem TragNguyen and currently co-coordinated with artist Flinh.

Performance art and contemporary art, in general, often possess an ephemeral nature with delicate boundaries, yet they maintain a distinct language of their own. Hay Là was established with the intention of bringing this unique language to practitioners and enthusiasts of performance art, serving as an intermediary space for discussion and the expansion of boundaries.

With an open spirit, Hay Là aims to build an ecosystem where movement and dialogue are constantly generated and sustained, contributing to the creative motivation of the artist community and those interested in performance art in Vietnam.

Hay Là develops its platform through three main areas: Hay Là Live Talk, Hay Là Archive, and Hay Là Workshop.

Notes
– For the most comprehensive and effective experience, participants are highly encouraged to attend all three sessions of this interconnected workshop series, or at least two, to fully grasp its progressive content.
– Participants commit to attending the program fully according to their registered schedule and are kindly requested to inform the organizers in advance of any changes.
– Due to limited capacity for professional effectiveness and smooth operation, successful registrations will be confirmed on a first-come, first-served basis.
– Your registration signifies your implicit agreement for the organizers to utilize any images or materials captured during the event for non-commercial purposes, such as archival, research, educational, and promotional communications.

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