Thu-Van Tran

Thu Van Tran (1979, Vietnam) develops an artistic practice that explores the concepts of contamination, identity, and language. She came to prominence at the Venice Biennale in 2017 and was nominated for the Marcel Duchamp Prize in 2018. In 2022, she completed a major commissioned body of work for the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh. In 2023, she exhibited at the Bourse de Commerce – Pinault Collection, while the MAMAC in Nice dedicated a major monographic exhibition to her work. She was also awarded the prestigious Rosa Schapire Prize from the Kunsthalle Hamburg. In 2025, she is in residence in Western Australia with the Perth Institute of Contemporary Art. She is preparing a solo exhibition at KINDL in Berlin for 2026, while the Palais de Tokyo in Paris will grant her its exhibition spaces in 2027.

Her residency project is part of her series Les Couleurs du gris, paintings made from minerals collected across Italy, from the Monti Lattari to the slopes of Mount Vesuvius. It is guided by The Sailor from Gibraltar (1952) by Marguerite Duras, and more specifically by the surge of life experienced by the narrator before Fra Angelico’s Annunciation in Florence. She seeks to bring this experience into the present day, wandering through Rome in search of a figure embodying our contemporary malaise, and of a work of art capable of opening a way out.

“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.