How are encounters constructed, and what kinds of knowledge shape what can emerge from them?
In this artist talk, Nguyễn + Transitory reflect on works developed through sustained collaborations and artistic research in Thailand and Vietnam. Working across sound, performance, installation and moving image, they explore what becomes possible when different ways of moving, listening, making and understanding the body meet without being required to resolve into a common language.
The artists will discuss works including cham-cam, Drifting to the Rhythms at the Southeast of Nowhere, and suân ซ่วน, for which they constructed touch-activated conductive environments as compositional infrastructures for performers. Using copper surfaces connected to modular synthesiser systems, these environments allow movement and physical contact to alter sound in real time. Rather than treating traditional practices as material to be translated into a contemporary form, the works create conditions for reciprocal exchange: movement shapes sound, listening reshapes movement, and the knowledge carried by performers influences what the work can become. New artistic languages and propositions emerge through these encounters, rather than from either framework alone.
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Their ongoing moving-image series Ghost Logic(s): Medium approaches these questions through a different set of relations. Filmed within spirit-medium gatherings and made without explanatory narration, the work engages with ritual without seeking to interpret or explain it from a distance. Instead, it attends to the gatherings as realities with their own understandings of presence, transmission and what a body can contain. Location sound anchors the work in the events filmed, while being stretched, looped and displaced so that sound and image do not always occupy the same time. Across three channels, bodies, gestures and sounds recur, disappear and return. Rather than offering a single account of the ritual, the work allows its own processes of mediation perceptible, allowing different times, presences and realities to remain unresolved.
The talk concludes with Off Tropics, a self-directed artist residency established by Nguyễn + Transitory in Chiang Mai. Here, questions of encounter and exchange extend beyond individual artworks to the conditions that sustain artistic practice: how time, space, relationships and long-term research can be supported outside dominant cultural centres. The residency offers a way to consider how artistic practices develop through sustained engagement with particular places, and how alternative infrastructures can make different forms of cultural production possible.
Booking is required for this event.
About Off Centre: Elsewhere in Practice
Off Centre: Elsewhere in Practice is a talk and editorial series initiated by esea contemporary Director Xiaowen Zhu, exploring how contemporary art is shaped beyond dominant cultural centres. Bringing together artists, curators, writers, and researchers working across East and Southeast Asia, the series foregrounds practices rooted in specific places, where artistic work develops through everyday life, local knowledge, and long-term engagement with communities.
Moving across urban villages, county towns, coastal regions, and regional networks, the series examines how artistic practice responds to labour, migration, ecology, and social change. Rather than positioning these places as peripheral to cultural production, Off Centre understands them as sites where cultural life is actively produced, negotiated, and sustained.
Together, the talks and accompanying essays consider how artistic practice is shaped by lived conditions rather than institutional proximity. Tracing connections across diverse contexts through questions of care, labour, knowledge, and placemaking, they attend to the ways art is produced, circulated, and sustained within situated environments, while asking how these sites, in turn, generate their own cultural imaginaries and forms of collective life.
Nguyễn + Transitory is the artist duo of Baly Nguyễn and Tara Transitory, based between Berlin and Chiang Mai. Working across sound, performance, moving image and installation, their practice examines how encounters take shape and how agency moves between bodies, materials, technologies and different forms of knowledge.
Since 2017, they have developed conductive environments as compositional infrastructures through which touch, movement and listening redistribute agency across bodies, sound and space. Their wider practice extends into moving image and engagements with ritual, exploring different understandings of presence, transmission and what a body can contain. Their ongoing body of work, Ghost Logic(s), develops these concerns across performance, installation and moving image.
Their work has been presented at Thailand Biennale, Serralves Museum, MAIIAM Contemporary Art Museum, Gropius Bau, MaerzMusik (Berliner Festspiele), Tanz im August, CTM Festival, KINDL – Centre for Contemporary Art and Radialsystem.
