Gestures of Return

Installation, photography prints, blackbox video screening
Kunstmuseum Thurgau, 5 June 2025 – 9 November 2025



Gestures of Return brings together new photographic and video works by the artist in her first solo exhibition at Kunstmuseum Thurgau. 
The works reflect on memory, ancestry, grief, and the layered act of returning — not only to places, but also to gestures, rituals, and feelings. Created over several years in Vietnam, Laos, Switzerland, and the spaces in between, the photographs and moving images capture fleeting moments of encounters, ceremonies, and atmospheres.

The large-scale prints and the video installation Fruits to Offer unfold as fragments of light, smoke, and texture, circling around what is passed on and what slips away. Rather than fixed documents, they appear as gestures in motion — fragile, cyclical, and deeply tied to diasporic experience. The exhibition draws attention to the subtle forms of belonging that surface in memories, inheritances, and the stories we begin to shape ourselves.



Gestures of Return I–III (2025)

Triptych, archival pigment prints, 3 × 130 × 200 cm

This triptych brings together fleeting moments of ancestral rituals, photographed across different journeys and times. Printed in human scale, the works occupy the room with a quiet physical presence, inviting viewers not only to look, but to move with the images. Smoke, fog, and fire appear as recurring motifs — fragile yet powerful elements I continually return to. The monumental prints create a field that surrounds the body, dissolving distance and turning memory into atmosphere.

In their format and installation, the works echo a lineage of photographic display — from monumental scale to unconventional framings. The images resist a fixed narrative; instead, they open shifting spaces where remembrance, ritual, and return are experienced as movement.