Three-year collaboration between Heritage Art Space and HfK Bremen
By Caroline Levin

'My Own Words' is a monthly series which features personal essays by practitioners in the Southeast Asian art community. They deliberate on their locality's present circumstances, articulating observations and challenges in their respective roles.

MAP installation view at MIPEC Tower, Long Bien, Hanoi. Image courtesy of Heritage Art Space.

Since 2023, Month of Arts Practice (MAP) has been structured as a three-year research collaboration between Heritage Art Space and HfK Bremen, with each edition expanding on the theme of mobility—first Alternative Mobility (2023), now Going Places, Moving Things (2024).

An angle of the arts that continues to remain under-covered is the behind-the-scenes work that makes art possible remaining unacknowledged—the bodies, brains, negotiations, logistics, and collective efforts.

Going against the grain, MAP placed all of this at the forefront, not just as a curatorial decision, but in the final presentation itself.

In short, MAP 2024 challenged the usual fixation on final products in the art world by fully foregrounding mobility, not only as a theme but as an active, relational force shaping artistic exchange, research, and cultural capital. By centring process over spectacle, MAP disrupted conventional hierarchies of artmaking, revealing how creativity emerges not in isolation but through movement, negotiation, and shared inquiry across borders, infrastructures, and communities.

To explore this, the essay moves through MAP’s key dimensions: first, how mobility was enacted beyond its thematic framing, shaping the very logistics and creative exchanges of the program; second, how art practice itself became a method of inquiry into Hanoi’s urban rhythms and histories; and finally, how MAP’s approach invites a rethinking of cultural capital, not as an individual asset, but as a collectively constructed and mobile form of knowledge.

Exhibiting process over final product

To talk about MAP is to talk about everything that happens outside of the artwork-spectator-white-cube dynamic. The spectacle behind the scenes—the movement of ideas, people, materials—is just as fascinating as the works themselves, if not more. Mobility, being the central theme, conveniently brings such “movement” to the surface.

MAP 2024 put full emphasis on process, meaning there is no proper exhibition of finalised products. Rather, it consisted of a series of open studios with guided talks by artists and MAP’s Hanoi-based curator Nguyễn Anh Tuấn to discuss the story behind the making of each work.

Considering the emphasis on process, this essay seeks not to focalise individual works as fixed finished objects. Instead, it examines how mobility was explored and enacted through MAP’s organisational, pedagogical, and curatorial frameworks. How did MAP 2024 push the boundaries of art’s role in exchange, research, and cultural capital? What does it reveal about artistic mobility beyond the finished exhibition?

Bremen-Hanoi MAP artists' roundtable from Heritage Art Space office in Hanoi. Image courtesy of Heritage Art Space.

Mobility art as cultural exchange

A good amount of time was collectively spent in the Heritage Art Space office. For those involved on all ends, this entailed perfecting the art of Zoom calls, the post-Covid backbone of cross-border cultural exchange.

Alas, these calls were not just logistical necessities, but rather shaped the very nature of artistic exchange throughout MAP. Here, mobility became not just about physical relocation, but about how ideas travelled across unstable Wi-Fi, time zones, and cultural assumptions. This viewpoint of the show reveals a rare glimpse into the brains and ping-pong of ideas that help the artworks make sense. The process of creative production comes as a by-product of exchanges, encouraging, elaborating, and challenging artists during their turn at the mic—mobility here undertaken not just through the exchange of ideas but also, at times, through transcultural friction.

How do cultural narratives move, shift, and get reinterpreted in transnational artistic spaces? Prior to the physical art-making, these ideas are formed within the cracks of these conversations. Through this lens, MAP becomes a microcosm of how mobility can be assessed beyond physical movement or unilateral exchange, to nuanced negotiation of meaning across borders.

Mobilising art as a method of collaborative research

Funnily enough, the city’s hypermobility became an inevitable subject for many foreign artists, a movement shaping their artistic practice as much as their daily navigation.

Swiss performance artist Benjamin Sunarjo once said that what impressed him most in Hanoi’s art scene was its relational heartbeat. To paraphrase, he alluded to the composition of collectives more so than individuals, and projects based on public participation rather than mere audience spectatorship. Seemingly, such heartbeat stimulated artists’ creative processes on all fronts. For starters, all artists had access to Heritage-assigned assistants to aid in navigating art- and city-related logistics.

From left to right: Curtain textile work of Laima Matuzonytė; data collection of human body measurements by Ngô Đình Bảo Châu. Image courtesy of Heritage Art Space.

For the visiting artists, art became a method of inquiring into Hanoi’s peculiar mobilities, shaping both their creative processes and their daily navigation of the city. This was evident in Sunarjo’s video installation, where he performed backwards walking amidst the mayhem of Hanoi’s sidewalks. Meanwhile, Lithuanian artist Lamia Matuzonytė’s printed digital drawings on textile curtains captured how Hanoians carve out informal break spots amid the bustle.

Subconsciously expanding on Benjamin’s remark about the relational nature of art in Vietnam, MAP’s Southeast Asian artists advanced this same art-as-inquiry approach, but with an accentuated collaborative community focus.

For these artists, the artwork itself was both a site-specific act of participation and a co-constructed narrative, intertwining physical engagement with conceptual inquiry. This was evident in ba-bau AIR’s Weather Forecast, which traced the history of Hòa Bình Province in a Mường village. Đà Nẵng-based A Sông Collective’s work with the Viet community in Thailand retraces the marginalised history of colonial displacement. Thai artists Awika Samukrsaman and Parichat Tanapiwattanakul, who were participants in ba-bau AIR’s AIRAsia residency programme, investigated Hòa Bình’s little-known Thai street through conversations, surveys, and mappings of Thai migration histories in Vietnam. Saigon-based Ngô Đình Bảo Châu’s participatory project is a “database” of movement and body measurements, collected through strands of rope from the artist’s friends across Vietnam that traced the contours of their bodies.

Audiences viewing A Sông's work. Image courtesy of Heritage Art Space.

The works in MAP 2024 did not simply illustrate mobility, they actively engaged with its tensions. Who gets to move freely? Who is displaced? What stories get mapped, and which are erased? After all, mobility does not unfold in a vacuum. Through their works, artists not only documented movement but also questioned its underlying politics. They make visible the structures that condition mobility, often in ways that remain unnoticed. This year’s MAP, in bringing together artists who themselves navigated unfamiliar territories, ultimately staged mobility as both artistic process and social critique.

GHTK delivery driver starting his workday as well as the mobile exhibition of Bremen artists’ photography. Image courtesy of Heritage Art Space.

For a mobile form of cultural capital

In hindsight, MAP’s central theme of mobility was not just a study of movement. It was also a rethinking of artistic authorship itself. What does it mean when mobility is not just a theme but an artistic method? What happens when the boundaries between artist, participant, and space dissolve into collective negotiation? These questions sit at the heart of MAP’s ethos, and they point to a broader challenge to the way cultural capital is often distributed, not as a collective process, but as an individual asset.

What is the place and purpose of art in society, as globally understood?

French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of cultural capital naturally comes to mind in such theoretical debate. In simplest terms, cultural capital is often framed as art knowledge enabling individual social mobility. People accumulate and leverage cultural knowledge, tastes, and credentials to help them navigate and advance within social hierarchies. The more you know the canons, the more you can attend the elite galleries, the more you have impressive commentary to give on the abstractionists, the more you are invited to the even more elite galleries. Art talk, art folk.

MAP artists' works from Bremen assimilated into Hanoi's urban landscape and rhythm. Image courtesy of Heritage Art Space.

How do we conceive of such capital outside of a Western-centric script of artistic engagement?

The delivery bikes’ bit of MAP 2024 is worth mentioning here: for a week in December, Bremen-based artists had their works displayed on GHTK delivery motorbikes as they moved through the streets of Hanoi, turning the delivery vehicles into a mobile exhibition space that brought art directly to the city’s urban landscape.

The incorporation of these delivery bikes into a curatorial practice shed light on the ways urban life itself generates aesthetic and cultural value. After all, these vehicles are deeply embedded into the globalised consumerist fabric of the city. Art thus was not merely reflecting the city but rather directly engaging it, blurring the lines between artistic intervention and the dynamic rhythms of Hanoian everyday life.

Amidst the context of MAP and surrounding Southeast Asia’s more experimental takes on curatorial art practice, perhaps there lies a possibility of rethinking a more collective or collaborative form of cultural capital on a universal level, where art is not just a resource for individual distinction but a means of structuring shared narratives and communal knowledge.In this sense, cultural capital is not only something individually possessed, as Bourdieu evoked, but also collaboratively produced, as MAP demonstrated.

One half of ba bau air's MAP work, painted by ba bau air member and artist Kanh. Image courtesy of Heritage Art Space.

Closing ponderings (equally still in process)

The dominant paradigm of neocolonial global hierarchy has long dictated the direction of cultural exchange: goods produced in the Global South, sold to the Global North; canons, theories, and knowledge produced in the Global North, transplanted to the Global South.

If MAP has illustrated anything, it is the multiple mobilities within art, mobilities that unfold beyond the gallery, beyond the market. One only truly notices them when the focus shifts away from the finished product, when an exhibition is no longer an endpoint, but part of an ongoing process.

As this is an article reviewing the behind-the-scenes of Hanoi’s most recent Month of Arts Practice, there lies a need to acknowledge and applaud the work of the Heritage Art Space team, Bremen University of the Arts (HfK Bremen), MAP artists in Hanoi and Bremen, the volunteers across the board/globe, the talented interpreters, the GHTK delivery bike drivers, the guest speakers Moon-Seok Yi, Phu Luc/Appendix collective, and the loyal followers of Hanoi’s dynamic contemporary art scene.