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I'm a Norwegian-Vietnamese designer and artist based between Oslo and Berlin. Born in the Bidong refugee camp in Malaysia and raised on Norway's west coast, my background drives my research into migration, diaspora stories, and multicultural identity.
Much of Vietnamese refugee history remains clouded in post-war trauma and politically charged narratives. My work seeks to make sense of our position as displaced individuals in the Western world and examines diasporic existence beyond simply digesting the past. I wish to envision what our identity looks like in the future.
Through field and archival research interpreted with a poetic lens, I create what I call poetic essays: exhibitions and projects that seamlessly intertwine poetry, photography, sound, video, and installation. My asymmetrical approach allows elements to inspire each other non-hierarchically. The work explores contradictions between perception and reality, truth and staging, filling historical and memory voids by creating plausible simulacra.
Ángel Luis González Fernández is a designer, artist, and curator supporting engaging visual arts practices, winner of Business to Arts David Manley Emerging Entrepreneur Awards 2011.
His work manifests through PhotoIreland, which he founded in 2010 to stimulate a critical dialogue on Photography. He devises curatorial projects placing conversations in the public realm around visual culture, critical thinking. These include events (PhotoIreland Festival, Halftone Print Fair, arts residency How to Flatten a Mountain, and New Irish Works), a cultural hub (The Library Project: Ireland’s Art bookshop, host to a unique resource library of photobooks and a productive arts programme), publishing projects that distribute inexpensive access to local practices, research projects (Critical Academy: examining contemporary art practices). He works collaboratively with a growing network of organisations, noticeably through ambitious Creative Europe partnerships.
During the Summer 2020 lockdown he launched the critical publication OVER Journal, now distributed globally. He received the Arts Council of Ireland’s Visual Arts Bursary to deepen research on the broad historical and specific artistic context of Photography in Ireland, to curate an ambitious survey exhibition in PhotoIreland Festival 2022 and to publish a series of publications on the matter. He regularly contributes to publications such as the forthcoming The Routledge Companion to Global Photographies, edited by Lucy Soutter, Duncan Wooldridge.
See some of his Graphic and Web Design work in the 100 Design Archive.
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