Performance by Mai Bach-Ngoc Nguyen / ARTefACTe 2026
Mai Bach-Ngoc Nguyen
Unknown Name
Performance: 40’
28.10.2026 — 7 pm
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The Vietnamese artist based in Canada will undertake an artistic residency at Homesession during October 2026. During the residency, she will present the performance piece «Unknown name» as part of ARTefACTe2026.
Unknown name is a performance that explores mourning through memory, absence and disappearance. The piece starts from a set of works in which the artist experiments with performative methodologies to investigate the ways in which mourning can be inhabited and represented.
In it, a ghostly figure (the artist herself transformed into a pond) becomes the axis of an action that moves between the bodily, the poetic and the spectral. The piece reflects on what remains after disappearance and on the traces of absence in bodies, spaces and memory.
“I am reading about the power of death, power through death and power over death. Perhaps it is not this finitude that interests me, but the words that derive from it: spectre, unease and echo. I am writing all this [to myself] from another place. I write this way to avoid the burden of remembering.” Mai Bach-Ngoc Nguyen
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Mai Bach-Ngoc Nguyen is a Vietnamese (in)disciplined artist based “where the river narrows,” Canada. Her practice explores passage, absence, and disappearance through performative methodologies. Her work questions colonial and cultural legacies, bringing into play poetic gestures, non-gestures, and institutional spaces put to the test.
Her work has been presented at festivals and artist-run centres in Canada and internationally, including Viva!Art Action, OFFTA, centre Skol, Eastern Bloc, and Fondation Darling in Montreal; Manif d’art, l’Oeil de Poisson, and Le Lieu in Quebec City; the Rouyn-Noranda Biennial of Performance Art; LIVEACTION in Sweden; El Laboratorio Inservi in Cuba; and Grace Exhibition Space in the United States.
The artist is in residence at Homesession in October 2026, thanks to a collaboration between Écart and Centre Clark.
The performance is carried out in collaboration with ARTefACTe 2026.
