Multimedia performance «Máy Làm Đau» («Pain Machine»)

   For one evening Ho Chi Minh City lets an audience into the workshop: composer and sound artist Hà Thúy Hằng brings a new piece to the public for the first time, folding video, sound, objects and the participation of the people in the room into a single work.

   The Vietnamese title «Máy Làm Đau» is rendered by the organisers in English as Pain Machine. The work grew out of the artist's reflection on the erosion of trust and on the mechanisms through which we inflict hurt upon one another. It is not a finished object: the project is conceived as an evolving one that may take on other forms of performance and installation in different spaces and contexts, and this evening is its first public presentation. Joining Hà Thúy Hằng is guest artist Nananarc, who on his own site describes himself as a multi-disciplinary artist from Hanoi and his sound work as industrial site recordings mixed with traditional musical elements, circling themes of contradiction, alienation and being ripped apart into different realities.

   Hà Thúy Hằng was born in 1989 and works in Hanoi. She took up classical piano at twelve, read musicology at Học viện Âm nhạc Quốc gia Việt Nam, the Vietnam National Academy of Music, and trained in experimental music and improvisation at the Hanoi centre DomDom. In 2018 the British Council chose her for its FAMLAB programme alongside six other Vietnamese artists, and the same year she started The Future of Tradition, a project for young people working with traditional art. In 2022 she received the Prince Claus Seed Award; the Dutch fund's profile says she promotes free expression through music and that her works explore the correlation between indigenous cultures and social change.

   The showing closes Ồ ẠT Oh Art Festival 2026, held under the theme Crossing Blue: a week of visual art exhibitions, curated film screenings, new performances and public programmes, with a deliberate focus on the practices of young Vietnamese artists and on first-time collaborations across disciplines. The organisers put their aim plainly, to make art accessible to the public while creating the conditions for artists to experiment and produce new work, and they note that the reservation fee goes towards the setup and production costs of the piece itself.

   The venue is 1982 Studio, which also hosts the festival's video-art exhibition «Hồn Thiên Nhiên» by Le Brothers across the week and gathers all three of this year's performance programmes under one roof. If you follow Vietnamese contemporary art and want to catch it before it hardens into a finished form, this is where you will.

   Capacity is limited and advance registration is required; a booking is confirmed by bank transfer, with the event name, your name and phone number as the payment reference and a screenshot sent on to [email protected]. If a workshop interests you more than a polished premiere, here you will see a piece still being made, and take part in making it.