Location:

station urbaner kulturen/nGbK Hellersdorf

Artist:

Arlette Quỳnh-Anh Trần

nGbK working group station urbaner kulturen:

Jochen Becker, Eva Hertzsch, Margarete Kiss, Constanze Musterer, Adam Page, Katharina Ziemke

Using the city of Vinh in central Vietnam as a case study, Arlette Quỳnh-Anh Trần’s exhibition PLATTENLOTUS explores the architectural and biographical repercussions of a divided socialist history. Through the interplay of architecture, sculpture, and video, a spatial installation at station urbaner kulturen/nGbK Hellersdorf reflects the tensions between ideal and reality, between import and appropriation, between collective memory and individual experience.

In her exhibition PLATTENLOTUS, Arlette Quỳnh-Anh Trần explores the architectural and biographical repercussions of a divided socialist history. The focus is on the city of Vinh in central Vietnam. Rebuilt after the devastation of the Vietnam War with the help of the GDR’s socialist solidarity programs, which had been in place since the 1960s, the city became a testing ground for socialist urban planning: standardized and efficient. The plans from the North encountered the material, cultural, and climatic conditions of the South—and were adapted. The GDR’s prefabricated concrete apartment blocks were originally designed for concrete and were constructed in Vietnam using local materials such as brick. This adaptation—or rather, appropriation—was more than pragmatic improvisation: it exemplifies a transformation movement on a technical, cultural, and political level. In Trần’s work, this architectural transformation is not limited to the past. Rather, it opens up a space in which material history, speculative futures, and personal memory intertwine.

Arlette Quỳnh-Anh Trần’s spatial installation PLATTENLOTUS (Plate Lotus) is a personal reflection on the concept of transplantation—a process of relocation, dissolution, and regeneration. The exhibition explores what happens when something is transferred, translated, or transplanted—understanding transplantation not as a loss of authenticity, but as a mode of producing reality.

A brick wall runs through the exhibition space, originally a retail space within a concrete block apartment building. Inspired by the Vietnamese adaptation of East German construction methods, this placement symbolically returns the previous adaptation to Berlin-Hellersdorf. It refers less to an original model and more to a form that has been transformed through changes in location, material, and conditions: an architectural trace that becomes legible not in its origin, but in its circulation.

The orange—originally imported from Spain and now a symbol of Vinh’s identity—also appears in the exhibition as an invasive sculpture. It nests within the walls, growing out of the brick. Neither definitively Vietnamese nor European, it embodies a history of migration and appropriation—and draws a personal parallel to the artist’s family history. The question is no longer where something „really“ comes from, but what it becomes when it moves.

Through the interplay of architecture, sculpture, and video, PLATTENLOTUS reflects the tensions between ideal and reality, between import and appropriation, between collective memory and individual experience. Trần shows how urban and cultural landscapes are not only shaped but also reinterpreted and transformed—a process that has influenced both Vietnamese history and the biographies of many migrants.

In PLATTENLOTUS, Trần, in collaboration with the Vietnamese architecture firm vn-a, connects real historical processes with speculative future scenarios. The installation combines socialist ideals, spirituality and sci-fi aesthetics, questioning the technocratic logic of the German-Vietnamese solidarity agreement – ​​a poetic-critical vision of the possibilities and contradictions of a future Vietnam as well as a new Hellersdorf.