ANIMA SGN | Hải Nam Nguyễn & Minh Duc Pham

For the third edition of ECHEA, ANIMA SGN’s ongoing conservation and listening series, curator Hải Nam Nguyễn and artist Minh Duc Pham come together in conversation around the exhibition An das wir uns festhalten / Nothing As Our Ground — a meditation on family, kinship, migration, and the fragile architectures of belonging.

Bringing together eleven artistic positions across photography, video, and installation, the exhibition reflects on queer and migrant realities in which “family” is no longer understood as a fixed structure, but as something continuously negotiated across borders, absences, memory, and survival. Relationships emerge not from stability, but from improvisation — from finding forms of care where political and social foundations have failed to exist.

Through the works of George Demir, Sunil Gupta, Rana Nazzal Hamadeh, Nhu Xuan Hua, Iden Sungyoung Kim, Jaewon Kim, Cheryl Mukherji, Su-Ran Sichling, Leonard Suryajaya, Sarnt Utamachote, and Vuth Lyno, the exhibition traces intimate gestures of tenderness and resistance: inherited trauma carried through objects and bodies, chosen families formed through displacement, and memories held together through images, textiles, flowers, and fragile acts of preservation.

Within ECHEA’s framework of conservation as both a material and emotional practice, the conversation will expand beyond institutional preservation into questions of what it means to conserve histories that were never fully archived — migrant histories, queer lineages, oral memory, embodied knowledge, and the quiet solidarities between communities shaped by movement and rupture.