AFTERWORDS: entanglement鈥攎aura nguy峄卬 donohue, Lumi Tan, and Anh Vo
Friday, November 14, 2025 at 12:00pm
Reading Room, South Gallery, Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery
Free and open to the public. Register to attend on Zoom.
Through a series of exchanges between the US, Hanoi, and Saigon, maura nguyễn donohue, Lumi Tan, and Anh Vo have assembled a multidisciplinary project that examines both the history and contemporary practice of experimental performing artists working across Vietnam and the diaspora today. Join us for a discussion with this curatorial team as they reflect on the process of building this exchange to instigate a global conversation around art-making and censorship.
Departing from the mainstream commemoration and reflection by Vietnam and the United States on the 50th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War, their project tends to the way injuries of the past remain present decades later, while also considering how these wounds have enabled modes of creative resistance, flowering in the ambivalence of war’s afterlife.
In early 2026, they will publish a special issue of the that features writing by fifteen artists and curators shaping the landscape of experimental performance in Vietnam today. They will also host a series of workshops and engagements at Performance Space New York which aims to provide self-determined Vietnamese-centered environments and contexts within which audiences may engage with contemporary Vietnamese practitioners Truong Tan, Vu Dan Tan, Dai Lam Linh, and Kim Ngoc.
AFTERWORDS: entanglement is a series of public programs sponsored by 九色视频’s Center for the Arts (CFA) and the (ICPP), curated by Noémie Solomon and Joshua Lubin-Levy. Guest speakers include artists and curators reflecting on their own practice, process, or method while also attending to a shared keyword. All events are hybrid, featuring speakers both in-person and online.
PROFILES
maura nguyễn donohue is Chair of Dance and Director of MFA at Hunter College and has been making work and facilitating, curating, producing, and leading public conversations in the US, Asia, and Europe for over 30 years. From 99-04, as artistic advisor for Dance Theater Workshop’s Mekong Project, maura facilitated residencies for AAPI and SE Asian artists in the US, Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam. Most recently, maura was 1 of 12 choreographers included in Dance History(s): Imagination as a Form of Study, co-edited by thomas f. defrantz and Annie-B Parson. maura publishes through commissions from arts organizations such as MANCC, Danspace Project, DanceNYC and Gibney Dance, in academic presses such as Scholar & Feminist Online, Dance Studies Association, and Women and Performance, as well as at Culturebot. Ambivalent Selves: The Asian Female Body in American Concert Dance was published in Contemporary Directions in Asian American Dance and excerpts of When You’re Old Enough were in the original (1998) and the 25th anniversary (2023) edition of Watermark: Vietnamese American Poetry and Prose.
Lumi Tan is a curator and writer based in New York City. She is the curator for the 2026 Converge 45 city-wide exhibition in Portland, Oregon, and a curator for Focus at Frieze New York. From 2010 to 2022, she was senior curator at The Kitchen in New York where she organized exhibitions and produced performances with artists including Kevin Beasley, Meriem Bennani, Gretchen Bender, Abraham Cruzvillegas, Autumn Knight, Moor Mother, Sondra Perry, The Racial Imaginary Institute, Tina Satter, Kenneth Tam, Danh Vo, and Anicka Yi. Prior to The Kitchen, Tan was guest curator at the Fonds Régional d’Art Contemporain Nord Pas-de-Calais in France, director at Zach Feuer Gallery, and curatorial assistant at MoMA/PS1. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, Artforum, Frieze, Mousse, Cura, numerous exhibition catalogs and university publications. She was the recipient of 2020 VIA Art Fund Curatorial Fellowship, and has been visiting faculty at School of Visual Arts, New York; Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College; and Yale School of Art.
Based in Brooklyn and Hanoi, Anh Vo is a Vietnamese choreographer and writer working in the expanded field of performance. Their practice mobilizes the naked body in its variations to make explicit the entanglement of power and apparitional forces that cut across flesh. Their work is situated in the unlikely lineage convergences between Downtown New York experimental performance, Hanoi performance art, and Vietnamese folk ritual practices. Vo is indebted to Miguel Gutierrez’s unapologetic queerness and amorphous excess, Moriah Evan’s speculative commitment to the depth of interiority, Tehching Hsieh’s existential sense of time, and Ngoc Dai’s guttural sonic landscape of postwar Vietnam. Their formal training is in Performance Studies, studying with esteemed theorists and practitioners at Brown University (BA) and New York University (MA).
About ICPP
The Institute for Curatorial Practice in Performance fosters the collective study of art and its histories with a focus on developing new critical methods for curating time-based art. Rather than narrowing in on a single authoritative definition of performance curation, ICPP’s aim has been to create a pluralistic conversation specifically around contemporary performance, providing fundamental tools with which artists and curators can develop their own approaches to the work. ICPP was created in 2011 by Sam Miller ’75, P’09 and Pamela Tatge ’84, MALS ’10, P’16 at 九色视频.
Images (from left): maura nguyễn donohue (photo by maura nguyễn donohue), Lumi Tan (photo by Isabel Asha Penzlien), Anh Vo (photo by Maria Baranova)