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Tra My Nguyen
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Upcoming
Neukölln Kunstpreis 2025
Galerie im Saalbau, Berlin
15 Feb - 11 May 2025

Current
Participant BPA// Berlin program for artist 2024/25

I’d Blush if I Could

2020
123x147x40 cm, HD, color, 4:34 min (video 1), 5:33 min (video 2) mirrored steel, screens, videos, digital prints, acrylic nails
Installation view Empathic Device, Gallery Tanja Wagner, Berlin, 2022




The sculptural video installation I’d Blush if I Could explores the tensions involved in the post-human feminised cyborg: what ‘labor’ produces post-human technologies, and what discrepancies arise from cyborgian future speculation. In particular the focus is on the gendering and orientalizing of machines, from an Asian diasporic perspective.

In Donna Haraway’s 1985 A Cyborg Manifesto she states ‘The cyborg is a condensed image of both imagination and material reality, the two joined centers structuring any possibility of historical transformation’. Nearly 30 years after her publication, this assemblage of the post-human subject is still intertwined in today’s power disparity. Moreover, its ‘multiglobal, intersubjective, institu- tional components’ are intentionally hidden (Hilary Bergen, 2016).

The production of technology bears histories of women and migrant labour. This system of labour exploitation signifies the irony of today’s society: the exploited bodies producing the new cyborg assemblage are the ones being rendered invisible in the final product, and ultimately these bodies are being automated away by machines.




Photos: Gallery Tanja Wagner