Liliana Basarab / Kvet Nguyễn
Artists-in-Residence May–June 2026, Romania / Slovakia /
© Cătălina Flămînzeanu / Tobias Paral
Liliana Basarab
Liliana Basarab is a visual artist who lives and works in Bucharest. Her artistic practice has a strong social dimension and manifests through various media, such as ceramics, textiles, drawing, performance, participatory workshops, and video. Her works often address themes related to gender, identity, and social norms, using irony and subtle humor to question traditional symbols and cultural narratives. She is involved and complicit in various forms of artistic organisation, from the Vector Association in Iași in the 2000s to the Sofia Nădejde Awards Collective (2018-2022) and currently the Malmaison Studios.
Project info
During her residency at the MQ, Liliana Basarab proposes an ecofeminist reimagining of Vienna’s mythological heritage. By revisiting and subtly detouring existing artworks, she exposes the patriarchal structures embedded in their narratives, reclaiming them as spaces of ecological and feminist potential. This approach continues her long-standing engagement with mythology, now situated within the urgency of contemporary ecological concerns, asking how ancient stories might be retold to imagine more just and sustainable futures. Reinterpreting figures such as Artemis, Demeter, and Gaia, she explores their transformation into agents of resistance and care, rather than passive symbols of fertility or feared “others.” In Vienna—where Art Nouveau often entwined the female body with floral ornament—this rereading shifts nature from decoration to an active, relational force that unsettles the patriarchal gaze.
KVET NGUYỄN (Hoa Nguyễn Thị, born 1995 in Nové Zámky, Slovakia) is a visual artist. Her multidisciplinary work primarily explores the theme of otherness in the context of post-socialist countries in Central and Eastern Europe, as well as in broader geopolitical relations. Using autoethnographic theory, she reflects on issues of dual cultural identity through the categories of memory, migration, exile, and longing. Nguyễn won the Oskár Čepan Award 2024 (together with Svetlana Fialová, Paula Malinowska, and Tomáš Moravanský) and completed a residency at the Delfina Foundation in London in 2024. She is author of the autobiographical essay Everything That Connects Us (2024), depicting the story of her family’s migration and her growing up as a Slovak-Vietnamese. Her most recent solo and group projects have been showcased at City Gallery Bratislava (SK), Galerie 35m2 (Prague, CZ), tranzit.sk (SK), The Július Koller Society (SK), Kunsthalle Bratislava (SK), VCCA (Hanoi, VN), and Center A (Vancouver, CA).
Project info
During her residency in Vienna, she will focus on researching post-war and post-crisis material culture, particularly objects created from the remnants of war that embody both survival and resistance. Working with archival and photographic materials, she will explore untold stories embedded in these fragile artefacts and examine how they carry collective memory. Her practice engages with what is hidden or unspoken, using material and image as entry points into broader questions of memory, identity, and belonging.
She also aims to connect with Vienna’s artistic and academic communities, engaging in dialogue on the role and limits of art today, while exploring possibilities for future collaborations between Vienna and Bratislava.
External Links
www.lilianabasarab.com
@lilianabasarab
www.kvetnguyen.com
@kvetnguye