Fotograf Magazine

Kvet Nguyen

Reframing Possibilities

Kvet Nguyen (Hoa Nguyen Thi) was born in 1995 to Vietnamese migrants in Slovakia. This clash of two different realities is the basis for every thinking process and eventually the dominant subject in her works. Kvet Nguyen currently studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bratislava, Slovakia. In 2019, she won second place at the World Biennial Exhibition of Student Photography.

↳ kvetnguyen.net

In today’s world, I find a painful past with cracks in the present. Photographs are not only proof of those cracks, but they also are connected to my second home that my parents abandoned. The medium of photography is often a tool of power involving humiliating others and maintaining privilege for the powerful ones. I look at the past while finding common denominators in the present times – not only in current political strategies but also in my very own growing trauma on the background of my Slovak-Vietnamese identity. I no longer believe in the boundless state of the entire world but I look for ways out of the repetitiveness of our history.