Minh Duc Pham is an artist and performer. He works with fragile materials such as clay, fabric, and flowers using traditional techniques like sewing, papermaking, and ikebana. [Papermaking means making new paper from old paper. The technique has been around for a very long time. And ikebana is a Japanese art form in which flowers and other materials are combined to create flower arrangements]. Through his art, he tells stories in a new way. This allows us to hear voices that have often been forgotten.
Minh Duc Pham was born in Germany. From a young age, he faced expectations from society: to fit in and do well. His early experiences with this pressure are part of Minh Duc Pham’s artistic work. He resists racism, classism, and queerphobia—in other words, various forms of discrimination. This resistance forms the basis of his art.
Minh Duc Pham is the son of Vietnamese contract workers. Many people from Vietnam worked in the GDR from the 1980s onwards. There was an agreement in place between the GDR and Vietnam. The contract workers typically worked in factories, often for several years. They lived in hostels or group accommodation and had little contact with the residents of the GDR. At the time, the political leaders said: “The contract workers come from a socialist brother country.” Despite this, their everyday lives were often full of exclusion and inequality.
Minh Duc Pham is developing a poetic memorial for the inner courtyard of the Kunsthalle Osnabrück. It is dedicated to the Vietnamese contract workers of the former GDR. It represents their sense of dependence, invisibility, and uncertainty.
Minh Duc Pham’s work is based on the analemmatic sundial. An analemmatic sundial is a special type of sundial. It shows the time with the help of the sun and a shadow. The special thing about it is that the shadow stick is not in a fixed position, but has to be moved depending on the date.
For Minh Duc Pham, this sundial is not just a way of telling the time. It is a poetic symbol of time. It combines memory, loss, and resistance. The hours are marked by winding flowers of different heights. This reminds us, among other things, that many contract workers opened flower shops after the reunification of Germany. The flowers are also a reminder of thorn and leaf removers. They symbolise the smoothing and flattening of resistance. At the centre of the work is an invitation: visitors can become the shadow-casting pointer of the sundial. By standing in the right place on the date scale, they can use their bodies to tell the time. But this movement is limited. The date is set to 11 April 1980. This is the day that the agreement between the GDR and Vietnam was signed. As a result, any time that can be read on the sundial is offset and distorted—a system that is not centred on people, but on political decisions.
This shift symbolises the cracks in the lives of many contract workers and their children. It shows how strongly state regulations have influenced their lives—and continue to do so today.
Minh Duc Pham (DE) lives and works in Berlin. His works have been exhibited at the Museum der Bildenden Künste in Leipzig (2023), the Stadtmuseum Dresden (2023), the Haus der Kulturen der Welt (2024) and most recently the Haus am Kleistpark (2024). Pham has also been involved in performances such as “Die Große Klassenrevue” (2023) at HAU 1, “Home Away From Home” (2021) at HELLERAU and Cloud Gate Theater Taipei, “Be Part Of” (2022) at Gessnerallee, Zurich and “Semiotiken der Drecksarbeit” (2022) at Mousonturm Frankfurt.
The exhibition is supported by Niedersächsisches Ministerium für Wissenschaft und Kultur, Stiftung Niedersachsen and Egerland Stiftung.