Arlette Quynh-Anh Tran is an art laborer based in Saigon. She makes art collectively and individually; curates and writes for various local and international publications, exhibitions, and projects. Her artworks blend politics and sci-fi aesthetics through the assemblages of animation, 3D design, historical archives, and architecture. She creates a non-linear and absurd reading of modern histories that question the dominant post-Cold War narratives about the Third World.
Tran is currently the Curator and Director of Post Vidai (since 2016) – a significant collection of Vietnamese contemporary art with bases in Geneva and Saigon. Previously she was Assistant Curator at Sàn Art (2013 – 2015) and Assistant Curator at Saigon Open City (2006).
She has contributed her research and writing to the 58th Carnegie International (2022); Asian Art Biennial (2021); Istanbul Biennale (2015); Hugo Boss Asia Award (2015); 2084 (2012) with Pelin Tan and Anton Vidokle; ‘Digitizing the Archival Materials of Blue Space Contemporary Arts Centre,’ for the Asia Art Archive, Hong Kong; 1st World Biennale Forum, Gwangju, Korea; Synapse – International Curator Network, HKW, Berlin; and solo shows for several emerging artists.
In 2012, together with visual artists Truong Cong Tung and Phan Thao Nguyen, she co-founded the Art Labor collective, working between the visual arts, social and life sciences in various public contexts and locales on long-term, multiple output projects which have been showcased at such venues as CCA-NTU Singapore; CCA Warsaw; Times Museum, Guangdong, China; Centre Pompidou, Paris, France; and 57th Carnegie International, USA.
Arlette Quynh-Anh Tran studied art and theories at Freie Universität Berlin, Univerzita Karlova in Prague, and California Institute of the Arts with a Fulbright scholarship. She was a fellow of Art in Networks: GDR and its Global Relations Fellowship, Institut für Kunst- und Musikwissenschaft, TU Dresden, Germany; and the 2022 Margaret F. Williams Memorial Fellow at the Asian Art Museum San Francisco.
