“Oracles from Beyond the Sea” brings together the work and research developed by the 2025–2026 fellows of the French Academy in Rome across disciplines including visual arts, architecture, literature, and art history. Curated by Imma Tralli and Roberto Pontecorvo (Marea Art Project), the exhibition explores works conceived as open-ended “oracles” that invite new ways of seeing. Among the participating fellows is Thu-Vân Trần, alongside artists and researchers from a wide range of fields. The exhibition is accompanied by a publication documenting the fellows’ projects.
Thu-Vân Trần (*1979, Ho-Chi-Minh City, Vietnam) develops an artistic practice that questions the concepts of contamination, identity, and language. Her residency project consists of continuing her series “Les Couleurs du Gris” (“The Colors of Gray”), paintings created using minerals collected across Italy, from Lombardy to Tuscany, right up to the slopes of Mount Vesuvius. This project is guided by “Le Marin de Gibraltar” (1952) by Marguerite Duras, and more particularly the revelation felt by the narrator in front of Fra Angelico's “Annunciation” in Florence. “It's this plot, the story of a sudden awakening, of a breath of life, that it is important to me to transpose to our times, to adapt and address to our generation, traveling all over Rome in search of that being who will embody our depression and of that work of art that will bring him out of it”, she explains.
