Vân Đỗ

Vân Đỗ is a curator and writer based between Vietnam and Thailand whose practice engages the site as a form of spatial practice shaped by ideological, affective, and ecological relations. Drawing on archival research, spatial dramaturgy, and site-responsive commissions, her work proposes alternative ways of engaging with histories, perceptions, and imaginaries in the present. Her current practice explores performance as a historiographic method, developed in close collaboration with Hanoi-based performance artists. Selected projects include Phụ Lục Project (2025–ongoing), Nostalgia for the Future (Hanoi Children’s Palace, 2024), Vy Trịnh: Overvoltage (Gia Lam Train Factory, 2023), White Noise (Nguyễn Art Foundation, 2023), and IN:ACT 2022 (Red River, 2022). She is the former Artistic Director of Á Space (2022–2024), an independent art space for experimental practices in Hanoi, where she continues to serve on the Curatorial Board, and a member of the founding curatorial team of deCentral, an art initiative set to open in 2027 in Bangkok and Chiang Mai.

Contributions

Hanoi Children’s Palace: Nostalgia for the “New Socialist Human” 

Beyond formal schooling, Hanoi Children’s Palace extended socialist cultivation into leisure time, reverie, artistic endeavors, and sports training. More than simply school routine, rituals were designed to develop the body and mind of the “new socialist human,” laying the foundation for building socialism in post-independence Vietnam. Taking the ideological history, architecture, and uncertain future of the Children’s Palace as a point of departure within the city’s broader projection of the creative industries as a strategic force, the project sought to examine how the institution’s pedagogical inheritance persists within the textures of everyday life and socialist memory.