Under this roof, Other roots
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was born in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, is a Norwegian-Vietnamese artist working between Oslo and Berlin. Nguyen grew up in the Bidong refugee camp and migrated to Norway as a child. His youth was spent on the west coast of Norway. Nguyen has a background as a designer and photographer, and has developed an art practice over the last few years – quickly becoming an emerging young artists.
Nguyen’s research includes themes of migration, diaspora stories, and multicultural identity. He wishes to celebrate these stories through his work. Nguyen sees his projects and exhibitions as poetic essays, delivered through an asymmetrical approach – seamlessly intertwining poetry, photography, video, and installation.
22th August -
27th September
Duy Nguyễn’s exhibition Under this roof, other roots at Northing takes its name from a poem of the same title, written by the artist himself. In the exhibition, the poem transforms into a thumping rhythm — a pulse that binds the work and the space together into a perpetual speculation, an improvised ritual, and a poetic mode that seeks radical forms of remembrance, faith, and existence.
The exhibition is part of Nguyen’s ongoing project Minimal Prayer (2025– ), a project that transcends the questions Nguyen explored in his earlier work on his family background as Vietnamese refugees and on diasporic topics such as migration, identity, and belonging. Instead of returning to oppressive memories of the past, the artist relocates himself to an imagined future where Western ideas of war, escape, and religion are replaced by impulses. When systems fall, the future might find new, more liberated forms.
The whole room of Northing Space has been transformed into the ghost of a ruin, where nine acrylic prints—created with inkjet and acrylic paint using a unique technique developed by the artist himself—connect to a rickety dual-channel video installation in which the past and the future, technology and culture, ghastliness and gracefulness, are woven into an inexplicable intricacy.
The exhibition is accompanied by a short story inspired by Duy’s video as the exhibition text, by art historian and critic Justine Nguyen.
