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Thu Van Tran
Fellow
2025 - 2026
Visual arts
Biography
Thu Van Tran (1979, Vietnam) develops an artistic practice that questions the concepts of contamination, identity, and language. Having been discovered at the Venice Biennale in 2017, she was nominated for the Marcel Duchamp Prize in 2018. In 2022, she produced a major commission of works for the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh. In 2023, she exhibited at the Bourse de Commerce – Pinault Collection in the Avant l’orage (Before the Storm) show and the MAMAC in Nice devoted an important solo exhibition to her. The same year, she received the prestigious Rosa Schapire Prize awarded by the Kunsthalle of Hamburg.
Project
Her residency project consists of continuing her series Les Couleurs du Gris (The Colors of Gray), paintings created using minerals collected across Italy, from Lombardy to Tuscany, right up to the slopes of Mount Vesuvius. This project is guided by Le Marin de Gibraltar (1952) by Marguerite Duras, and more particularly the revelation felt by the narrator in front of Fra Angelico’s Annunciation in Florence. “It’s this plot, the story of a sudden awakening, of a breath of life, that it is important to me to transpose to our times, to adapt and address to our generation, traveling all over Rome in search of that being who will embody our depression and of that work of art that will bring him out of it”, she explains.
The fellows
2024 - 2025
Open call fellows annual selection
Each year, the French Academy in Rome - Villa Medici organizes an international competition to select fellows who will be welcomed at the Villa Medici in Rome for a 12-month residency in creation, experimentation and research (residency begins in September, ends in August).