poetry plus
Thursday November 28, 2019
7pm @ MoT+++

performance plus 2019

an intimate and casual communion of words, poems, prose, musings, utterances and artworks centred on the textual form. artists will read both original works and the works of others in a variety of mediums. part poetry reading, part spoken word, part screening, the evening collaboratively performs an exploration of our relationship to language, and through language to each other.

artists:
Morag McKee
Lananh Le
mrbambii
Mathieu Dufourg
Nam Thi
JJ
Tobias Ahlbrecht
Le Phuong Nhi
TK
Cam Xanh
mi-mimi
Dang Hong Anh

Morag McKee

Morag McKee works and plays between magic and logic. She is a poet and performer based in Sài Gòn, especially engaged in interdisciplinary, interlinguistic practice. Works include “POTATO (repeat)”, a multidimensional exploration of time travel / “A Late Capitalist Love Story”, with performance duo Black Mackerel / “EXO”, a sequence of dance poems considering insects / “The work of sex in the age of mechanical reproduction”, a zine from the world of sex robots. Morag has performed poetry and dance in bookshops, bars, coffee shops, warehouses, bathtubs and theatres in Sài Gòn, Hà Nội, Berlin, Cambridge. She likes clouds, colours, questions. More words here : gormandgasp.tumblr.com

Lananh Le

Lananh Lê is a multidisciplinary artist based in Ho Chi Minh city, Vietnam, graduated from Stanford University with a BA in Ethnicity Studies in 2015. Her art projects explore oral history, mythology and public cultures of memory. Lananh is compelled to create “mythical ecologies,” otherworldly realms where she can investigate the relationship between mythology, ecological formations, and how diverse cultures express their relationship with the universe.

mrbambii & Mathieu Dufourg

Nam Thi

Nam Thi sinh năm 1994 tại Hà Nội, tốt nghiệp chuyên ngành Triết học và hiện đang là editor tạp chí L’Officiel Vietnam ở TP. Hồ Chí Minh.

Câu đề từ trong cuốn sổ thơ mà Thi viết khi còn ngây ngô thủa đi học là:

“Trong gian khó tôi tị nạn vào thơ”

Thơ là không gian cấp cứu của tâm tư. Nam Thi thực-hành-thơ với tinh thần phơi lòng mình một cách kín đáo bằng cấu trúc chữ gợi hình tượng. Với Nam Thi, sáng tác thơ là sáng tác chữ. Thơ cho phép chữ được giải phóng mình khỏi tính-tiêu-dùng, đứng độc lập như một thực thể tự do biểu hình, biểu nghĩa, biểu cảm mà không bị quy định bởi bất kỳ đường biên khái niệm. Thi để chữ va đập, lạ hoá, hoặc đôi khi là gợi lại từ thân quen nhưng bị đóng khung một nét nghĩa, để chữ được chuyển động. Tiếng Việt vốn tuyệt đẹp và Thơ sẽ phù sa tiếng Việt như động tác của những con sông.

Năm 2018, Nam Thi vinh dự được Heritage Space tại Hà Nội mời làm diễn giả trong chuỗi art talk với chủ đề “Chất thơ trong thơ”.
Năm 2019, Nam Thi vinh dự khi được tạp chí Subtitle ở Mỹ chọn 2 bài thơ (một viết hoàn toàn bằng tiếng Pháp, một kết hợp tiếng Việt) đăng vào ấn phẩm nghệ thuật trong khuôn khổ kiện Southeast Asian Short Film Festival tại Chicago – Mỹ.
Ngoài ra các bài thơ và quan điểm sáng tác Thơ của Nam Thi cũng được các tạp chí như L’Officiel, J.O.Y đăng tải.

JJ

Jackson “JJ” Soa is a poet and art writer from Baltimore (USA), where they graduated from the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University and received a dual degree in Art History. JJ writes all sorts of poems but particularly enjoys using/inventing challenging poetic forms and writing ekphrases, or poems inspired by other works of art. JJ is in the process of setting up an arts blog and is nervously—and probably inelegantly—attempting to rejoin social media as a result. You can track their progression on Instagram (@jj_soa).

Tobias Ahlbrecht

Le Phuong Nhi

Le Phuong Nhi is a performance and installation artist based in Saigon, Vietnam. she studied at Studio Arts College International in Florence, Italy. She explores themes of Natural Self, Space, and Time through familiar materials and objects with potentially metaphorical meanings. her work ranges from clay sculptures to performance and installation art, retains the human element and focuses on abstract and organic forms. she considers performance art as a ritual practice and aims to create a spiritual and safe space where her spectators can confront their true selves and egos. Recently, she has been selected as one of the artists of ‘You Can Talk To Me’ project by iSEE (Vietnam) and of the residents of Southeast Asian Arts Residency 2020 (Malaysia).

TK

Cam Xanh

Cam Xanh (real name: Tran Thanh Ha, b.1977) is a conceptual artist from Vietnam based in Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City). she co-founded the Post Vidai Collection—the first collection dedicated to contemporary Vietnamese art—in 2004 and has acted as its Director / Curator since then. in 2014 she co-founded the Dia Projects which morfed into MoT+++. she began making art in 2012 under the pseudonym Cam Xanh and has exhibited en Vietnam and internationally. her artist name Cam Xanh, which translates as Green Orange, exemplifies the minimalist and playful nature of her works.

mi-mimi

mi-mimi is an interdisciplinary artist, based in hanoi, who is currently focusing on language, text, and, especially, poetry.

she’s also working as a teacher teaching typography and history of graphic design, a translator and a book editor focusing on art and education content. she’s a contributor in several art spaces such as noirfoto darkroom-studio-gallery in saigon and á space – experimental arts – in hanoi.

for mi-mimi, art and science are the same: to recognize the melody in the chaos. practicing art leads her walking on the path through the chaos of existence and anti-existence – the only path for her journey of self-realization as a ‘human’.

she often reckons herself to be a conductor, a method to transcribe and to express, a soil to receive and to nurture the seeds of all speak-able and un-speak-able voices – from the un-see-able parts of the universe(s) and from the visible world of human-beings.

in her performance in ‘poetry plus’, she’s discovering and expressing, at the same time, the power of different languages, different voices, different contexts of voices: communicative and non-communicative, understandable and not understandable, all together. there will be a love poem, strangers, lovers, original, translated, unknown, hidden, and a video installation.

Dang Hong Anh

Hong Anh Dang works intermedia with the camera, texts, writing, and other materials. She explores dreams whimsically across the personal/non-personal, different fields of knowledge, fictions, cultural artifacts, and between Vietnamese and foreign.
Arts is a means for liberating mind and soul; and trying to connect with or making sense of identity/ culture and the current contemporary world.
“We also cannot help but put ourselves through strange zones in different ways to make something creatively that can be personally true. Things I make are usually quite funny. They are places of the personal/non-personal or places of dreams, and tend to come from what I find very vivid or memorable. I can stand there looking at them, contemplating and enjoying when they are realized”.

an episode of collective dreaming to end the evening:
‘come together and find a space to lay down comfortably on the floor. notice the darkness and feel its blessing for you to speak freely. we take it in turns to speak. wait for the person talking to finish before you start. count to three in your head from when they end to when you begin. this is the one rule.’

performance plus 2019 is supported by Asia-Europe Foundation – ASEF Mobility First! | Norwegian Crafts| Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs
in partnership with A. Farm.