Arlette Quỳnh-Anh Trần is an art laborer based in Saigon. She creates art both collectively and individually and also curates and writes. Her artworks combine politics and sci-fi aesthetics through the use of animation, 3D design, historical archives, and architecture. Arlette is fascinated by the idea of a futuristic Third World utopia where political ideals are reimagined, and humans and non-human beings coexist and merge. She presents a non-linear and absurd interpretation of modern histories that challenges the dominant post-Cold War narratives about the Third World.
In 2012, together with visual artists Trương Công Tùng & Phan Thảo Nguyên, she co-founded the Art Labor collective, which operates at the intersection of visual arts, social, and life sciences in various public contexts and locales, working on long-term, multiple output projects.
Solo Show 2024
iii.x_Unrealized Utopia, Gallery Medium, Saigon, Vietnam
Group Shows 2024
REFUGE, Lagos Biennial 2024
Dream Screen, Leeum Museum of Art, Seoul
Cloud Chamber, Para Site, Hong Kong
the future is present, the harbinger is home, Prospect New Orleans 6
2023
Revolutionary Romances. Transkulturelle Kunstgeschichten in der DDR: Albertinum, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden
2022
Posthuman: Story Telling for Earthly Survival, Asia Culture Center, Gwangju
2010
Syntax and Diction, Sàn Art, Saigon
Awards, Grants and Scholarships 2025
Asian Cultural Council’s New York Fellowship Program
2023
Teiger Foundation research grant
2022
Art in Networks: GDR and its Global Relations Fellowship, Institut für Kunst- und Musikwissenschaft, TU Dresden
Margaret F. Williams Memorial Fellow at the Asian Art Museum San Francisco
Artist-in-residence at the Asia Culture Center, Gwangju, Korea
2019-2022
Fulbright Foreign Student Program Scholarship
Lillian Disney Scholarship, CalArts, USA
2013
synapse - The International Curators' Network at Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin
2012
ERASMUS Scholarship, Eastern and Central European Studies and Philosophy, Charles University of Prague