Elissa Vinh (UCL) - 2025-26 Students
elissa.vinh.25@ucl.ac.uk

The Gặp: On the Formation of Vietnamese Identities Across Time and Borders

This research project explores how Vietnamese identities are shaped, negotiated, and reimagined in contemporary art. Departing from Tina Campt’s method of listening to images, it engages with the resonances emitted by current curatorial perspectives in Vietnam, the affect-driven preservation of the An Việt Archives and the work of London-based Vietnamese artists. The exploration of these practices aims to trace how subjects navigate histories marked by haunting colonial entanglements. At the crossroads of geographical and temporal dislocations, this approach proposes a critical framework to discern what persists in the gaps between colonial pasts, diasporic presents and imagined futures. Central to this theoretical conceptualisation is the transcultural homonym of the Vietnamese word gặp, meaning to encounter or to meet. It is within this ambivalent space of connections and disconnections, that this project listens to the narratives that colonial pasts have silenced and the diasporic futures that have yet to sound. In attuning to these frequencies, this research foregrounds the intergenerational expansion of narratives from the Vietnamese diaspora in a British-European context. This readdresses the often overlooked transnational British-Vietnamese hybridities overshadowed by the extensive academic and cultural focus on the Vietnam War in a North American context.

Principal supervisor: Prof Mignon Nixon