The Dogma Prize’s The Multiverse exhibition in 2017

The exhibition introduces paintings, sculptures, installations, moving images and animation on the theme of self-portraiture.

The artworks, presented as both an artistic craftsmanship and a means of self-expression, reveal the deeper layers of personal stories and self-inquiries of each artist.

In order to encourage the artists to uncover, understand and give insights to their personal identity and inner world, the Encounter exhibition sets a stage where the artists, as individual subjects, observe personal and deep-rooted inner objects through the means of reflection, revealing unavoidable paradoxes between internal and external realities.

The artworks show tensions between growth and destruction, as in the case of Iggy Dang’s installation, exposure and hiding in Dang Viet Linh’s painting, societal discipline and freedom in Tran Quoc Giang’s objects, or rationality and emotions in Pham Hong’s sculpture.

Encounter also encourages reactions through the meeting between the artist and the reality of which he has to cope with, a condition that enables Giang Nguyen’s inter-discipline artwork to open up and pose questions to the external world, the advance of technology into the future in particular. Through the work, collective visions can be seen yet personal voices can still be heard.

A noticeable feature of the exhibition is the diverse choices of medium, tone, form and technique, enabling Vietnamese artists from different backgrounds and with various art styles to celebrate the spirit of creating self-portraiture.

Meanwhile, spectators are encouraged to invent their own translations. Unattached to any privileged artistic medium, they can appropriate the artworks for themselves in ways that the artists might never have imagined.

The Dogma Prize was founded in 2009 and is funded by the independent Dogma Collection. The prize occurs every two years, and the Dogma Prize 2019 is the sixth edition.

The purpose of the prize is to support Vietnamese artists, whether resident in Vietnam or overseas, through a focus on self-portraiture, which has a long and distinguished history throughout human civilization, in all disciplines.