LET’S SLEEP AND WE’LL SEE

Nguyễn Quốc Thành & Nhà Sàn Collective exhibition

What is it about?

The exhibition Let’s Sleep and We’ll See is an artistic story about memory, queer, sleep and migration, prepared by Nguyễn Quốc Thành – a Hanoi-based artist and curator – in collaboration with Nhà Sàn Collective. The installation, prepared especially for the Lodz of Many Cultures Festival, transforms the museum halls into a templarium, or “temple of sleep” – a space suspended between countries, languages and identities.

The exhibition combines films, images, textiles and archives to create a complex narrative about the Vietnamese diaspora’s experience in Poland, queer stories and sensitivity to the past. It is a journey through fantasy and documentary, memory and future, between Vietnam and Poland – and what remains in between.

An important part of the project is also an insight into the collective art practice of the Nhà Sàn Collective, a Hanoi-based independent initiative working at the intersection of art, activism and everyday life.

By whom?

Nguyễn Quốc Thành – artist, curator, co-founder of Nhà Sàn Collective in Hanoi. In 2013, he founded the Queer Forever! festival, which has become an ongoing project, a pop-up cinema, a book and zine workshop, a kitchen, a space for queer people to meet, listen, watch, make art and love. Thành has participated in performance art festivals, exhibitions and conferences in Japan, Myanmar, the Philippines, Thailand, the US and Vietnam. He spent many years in Poland, co-founding, among other things, the Five Flavors Asian Film Festival in Warsaw, and spent his first year living in Lodz, where he learned Polish. In 2022, he co-created the ưhưh22 project, which was part of the Nhà Sàn Collective’s work at the 15th documenta in Kassel. At the time, he also exhibited at TRAFO Trafostacja Sztuki in Szczecin, where he was on an artist residency co-organized with Goyki 3 Art Incubator in Sopot. He lives in Hanoi.

The Nhà Sàn Collective’s male and female artists are also participating in the project, including Phan Thảo Nguyên, Nguyễn Trinh Thi, Nguyễn Duy Anh, Nguyen Tan Hoang, Vu T.Thu Ha, Quynh Dong, Tạ Minh Đức and others.

Curator:
Stanisław Ruksza – curator of exhibitions, art historian, author of texts, lecturer. Director of TRAFO Trafostacja Sztuki in Szczecin since 2017 and chief curator of the institution. Program director of the CCA Kronika in Bytom from 2008-2017. Studied art history at the Jagiellonian University. Since 2021, Chairman of the Academic Council of the Academy of Art in Szczecin. Curator of many exhibitions at home and abroad. He lectures at the Academy of Art in Szczecin. His research focuses on the relationship of art to social and political changes, contemporary iconoclasm, the issue of sexuality and death, and boundary phenomena in contemporary art. Resident at apexart in New York (2009), Careof DOCVA in Milan (2013, 2015) and Cité internationale des arts in Paris (2017), MeetFactory in Prague (2018), Guangzhou Academy Of Fine Arts (2024). He lives in Szczecin.

Who is it for?

• for anyone interested in contemporary art, intercultural relations, queer themes, migration history and criticism of Orientalist narratives
• for people from the arts and academia, the LGBTQIA2S+ community, national and migrant minorities (with a special focus on the Vietnamese community in Poland)
• people curious about non-obvious alliances and forms of community

Note: one of the works contains scenes of a sexual nature – information about this will be posted before entering the exhibition space.

Why is it worth it?

In a world full of simplifications and stereotypes, Let’s Sleep and We’ll See proposes another language – the language of dreams, queer imagination and shared memory. It is not just an exhibition, but a space of encounter: between cultures, biographies, communities and perspectives.

It is also an attempt to give voice to one of the most numerous and still underrepresented communities in Poland – people of Vietnamese descent.

Let’s Sleep and We’ll See is also a gesture to return – artistically and emotionally – to Lodz, the city where Nguyễn Quốc Thành began his Polish journey.

Partners:

Trafostacja Sztuki in Szczecin

Availability

Curatorial tour on October 4 with translation into Polish Sign Language.

The space where the exhibition will be presented is accessed by a long, steep staircase, no elevator. Possibility to enter with a guide dog.
Toilets for people with disabilities: accessible on the first floor of the building. Accessible mute area: “Neoroom” with entrance from the courtyard. Parking: public, municipal parking.
Nearby bus and streetcar stops: Gdańska/Zielona, Zachodnia/Więckowskiego, Więckowskiego/Gdańska

Photos

Nguyễn Quốc Thành by Marta Miszuk
Nguyễn Quốc Thành, Let’s Sleep and We’ll See, by Andrzej Golc
Stanisław Ruksza, by Radek Kurzaj

#QueerForever #VietnameseCulture