Novel Without a Title

Thu Van Tran’s practice is consistently inspired by literature, history, architecture, and nature, focusing her attention on the ways in which the cultural concepts of contamination, identity, and language are explored within these fields. For the exhibition at the Kunsthaus Baselland—the artist’s first solo show in Switzerland—speech, or rather speechlessness, plays a central role. The exhibition title Novel Without a Title is an explicit reference to the Vietnamese writer Duong Thu Huong and her novel Novel Without a Name. At the heart of this reference is the question of our ability or perhaps our inability to narrate and transmit stories and tragedies. Can we speak about the unspeakable?