TO MOVE, TO CARRY, TO REMAIN

Phuong Thao Nguyen and Ayşe Ateş.
Curated by: Razan Sabbagh

10 - 24.07.2027, nachspeicher23.

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To Move, To Carry, To Remain brings together new bodies of work by Phuong Thao Nguyen and Ayşe Ateş.

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Both artists work through movement — tracing, searching, listening, returning. Their practices unfold through journeys and encounters in which the path itself becomes part of the work. What is found along the way does not simply fill a gap or complete a missing story. It shifts the direction of the search, changes the role of the artist, and becomes part of the work’s own unfolding.

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The exhibition asks what it means to remain in motion as an artist — not only physically, but in relation to the material, the story, and the people encountered along the way. The artist enters as a guest — into another's story, life, or history — and yet gradually becomes a guestkeeper: the one who holds what was found, creates the conditions for its reception, and remains accountable to a story that is not entirely their own. These two positions are never resolved and stay in tension throughout the work.

Within the annual theme of Hospitality, the exhibition treats hospitality as a practice of continuous negotiation. To enter another place, memory, or history means to keep renegotiating one's position within it: when to speak, what to carry, and when to leave a story with those it belongs to.

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Phuong Thao Nguyen is an artist and filmmaker. Her work follows the trails of people, stories, and objects through cultural and political landscapes. Moving across film, sculpture, installation, and writing, her practice remains rooted in non-fiction while opening space for intimate, fragmented, and layered forms of narration.

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Ayşe Ateş works through tracing, listening, and following. Her practice begins with fragments—oral accounts, chance encounters, material remnants, and overlooked details—through which broader constellations of memory, place, and relation gradually unfold.​

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