ba-bau AIR is a collective of curators, producers and artists. Their practices focus on designing safe spaces, curation & producing exhibitions, designing programs, emerging interdisciplinary collaborations & community-based work. They are running ba-bau AIR - a flexible space (artist-in-residence, kitchen, studio) in Hanoi (2019-) and Hoa Quỳnh Cinema (an intimate, impromptu screening project & production since 2021).
“Duyên” (English: Destined encounter, Chinese: 緣 yuán) is a noun, a verb, an adjective, a feeling, a spell, a sound, a space. Duyên is a character, a sign, a moment, a fantasy, etc. ba-bau (contemporarily) is an independent art residency, studio and kitchen located in the center of Hanoi, founded in Jan 2019. Focusing on “Duyên” concept, ba-bau connects, supports, incubates and pushes the multi & interdisciplinary collaboration through organizing and moderating experiments and conversations between practitioners with practitioners and practitioners with experts coming from other fields.
key-words: kitchen, kitchen culture, experiment, invading and transforming the existing spaces, intimate space, safe and cozy space for questions & conversations
To facilitate the spirit of duyên, we keep our space in a state of impermanence in which each room’s characteristics and functions can flexibly be changed as needed to suit different circumstances. The default configuration includes 2 bedrooms, 1 kitchen and dining room, 1 studio.
However, each room can be and had been reconfigured to serve any of the following functions: film screening, artist talk, working studio, exhibition, residency, dining, performing stage and others…
Hoa Quynh aka Night Blooming Cereus, a flower that only full-blooms and shines magically in the dark, reminds us of our loving projection screen that always lights up and comforts us during all those pop up movie nights at the babau space. Founded and running by our two member collective, Nguyen Duy Anh and Cao Viet Nga, Hoa Quynh Cinema is the film departure of ba-bau, focusing on organizing moving-image related activities, programs and production.
Thao-Linh Dinh
Dinh Thao Linh is an independent art manager and curator in Hanoi who works with space, community and focuses on exchanges. In 2019, she founded ba-bau AIR - an intimate artist-in-residence space with a kitchen, coffee table, dining room and studio. She also experiments with haircuts, poetry writing, and other multidisciplinary practices.
Kieu-Anh Nguyen
Based in Hanoi, Vietnam, Kieu-Anh Nguyen (b. 1997) is an art practitioner with a background in linguistics and international relations. Her art takes the form of social participation, soft sculpture, writing, drawing, and food experiments; the works often suggest convergence between time, spaces, and sensory experiences. In doing so, her artistic vision cherishes and addresses the ephemerality of life, including unnoticed details and unconventional narratives.
She joined ba-bau AIR in 2019 and co-founded ba-bau collective in 2021, where she co-create safe spaces for boundaryless experimental & interdisciplinary collaboration. She moonlights as a perfumer.
Cao Viet Nga
Cao Viet Nga is a film student and space manager. She has ten spicy levels, now she's at three.
Nguyen Duy Anh
Nguyen Duy Anh is a queer moving-image artist in Hanoi, Vietnam. Discovering himself through researches into the mainstream culture and film practices, his practice leans towards secluding subjects from their original contexts while interrogating other aspects such as identities, roles, values, and tragedies, in the needs of self-fictionalizing, self-liberating when charged under the outer directions and the normative gaze from power-upholding systems. The subject groups Duy Anh works with include queer people, women, adolescents, manual laborers and artists. Morphing ponderings into practices through different formats like documentaries, fictional films, video-music videos, he strives to push a distinctive signature in experimenting with visuals, sounds, actings, and narratives in filmmaking, storytelling.
The ba-bau team