Nissa Nishikawa works with performance, ceramics, painting, glass, and film. Her practice interprets traditional forms of dance, ritual and craft in ways that illuminate the current crisis in ecology and community. She engages with alchemical and animistic practices through the use of elemental base materials, forging processes of transformation that are intuitively informed by a close observation of the intelligence of nature and the non-human as systems of navigation. This ongoing fascination extends to the embodied principles of movement while bringing together many disciplines in one space.
She studied Fine Arts at Concordia University in Montreal, Quebec, Stage Arts at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London and holds an MA in Performance from Goldsmiths College. Experiences stemming from time with Min Tanaka, Steve Paxton, Anna Halprin and dervish turning of the Mevlevi tradition are paramount to her practice. Recent workshops have been held at the Architectural Association (London), Camden Arts Centre (London) and the Victoria and Albert Museum (London).
Born in 1942 into an intellectual family with Western influence. Teacher of literature in high school since 1965. Journalist since 1973. Imprisoned for 39 months (1982-1985) for keeping poems in manuscript considered “anti-revolutionary”. After the “Renewal Policy” of the Communist Party of Vietnam (1986-1987), resumed journalist job and publishing poetry & translation, poems of prison experience excepted. Poems translated into French, English, Swedish and published in France, the US and Sweden. Western poems translated and published by Hoang Hung include Guillaume Apollinaire, Federico Garcia Lorca, Walt Whitman, Wallace Stevens, Allen Ginsberg, Charles Simic, Louise Gluck, Margaret Atwood, Harry Martinson, Nelly Sach.
