Diane Severin Nguyen:
IF REVOLUTION IS A SICKNESS 

Sep 16–Dec 13, 2021

SculptureCenter

SculptureCenter, supported by the Polish Cultural Institute New York, is pleased to present the first solo institutional exhibition of artist Diane Severin Nguyen featuring a newly commissioned video work. The exhibition is built around the new moving image work, co-commissioned by SculptureCenter and the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago and filmed in 2021. Set in Warsaw, Poland, the film loosely follows the character of an orphaned Vietnamese child who grows up to be absorbed into a South Korean pop-inspired dance group. Widely popular within a Polish youth subculture, K-pop is used by the artist as a vernacular material to trace a relationship between Eastern Europe and Asia with roots in Cold War allegiances.

This dichotomy of the East and the West is further complicated by the significant Vietnamese diaspora currently living in Poland, composed of Northerners who migrated before the fall of the Iron Curtain, and Southerners who came in the aftermath of the Vietnam War. While such inherited divisions may be invisible to the majority culture in which they are situated, Nguyen traces how these layered inner conflicts are reckoned within the process of finding shared symbols and naming oneself from within another’s regime. Consistent with Nguyen’s long term artistic concerns, this inquiry probes the paradoxes inherent to photography: how can self-actualization happen within the unifying realm of representation? How can a medium that excludes or suppresses parts of reality exceed the failures and omissions of language?

For the project, Nguyen assembled a crew of teenaged Polish dancers who perform original choreography set to music and lyrics co-written by the artist. By arranging these trained bodies, who are invited to “lose themselves to the new image,” as Nguyen’s lyrics suggest, the artist looks at both the exaltation and erasure of personal traumas at play in the process of representation, identity building, and the formation of a shared nation space.

The exhibition is curated by Sohrab Mohebbi, Curator-at-Large, and is co-organized with the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago, where it will be on view in spring 2022. The Chicago presentation is curated by Myriam Ben Salah, Director and Chief Curator. A publication – the artist’s first – will accompany the exhibition.

Diane Severin Nguyen (American, b. 1990) is an artist who uses photography and time-based media. Her photography hybridizes the organic and the synthetic into amalgam sculptures, held together by the parameters of a photographic moment, and her video work expands that moment into a layered cultural and historical context in which language is collapsed into bodies. She currently lives and works between Los Angeles and New York. Nguyen earned an MFA from Bard College in 2020 and a BA from Virginia Commonwealth University in 2013. Recent solo and two-person exhibitions include Between Two Solitudes, Stereo, Warsaw; Tyrant Star (online exhibition), Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Reoccurring Afterlife,Empty Gallery, Hong Kong; Minor twin worlds, with Brandon Ndife, Bureau, New York; Dead Slow, with Julien Monnerie, Exo Exo, Paris; and Flesh Before Body, Bad Reputation, Los Angeles; all 2019. Nguyen’s latest video, Tyrant Star (2019) was screened in the Shorts Program at the 57th New York Film Festival; the Yebisu Festival, Tokyo; and IFFR, Rotterdam. Recent group exhibitions include Made in L.A. 2020: a version, Hammer Museum and The Huntington, Los Angeles, 2020-2021; and Bodies of Water: 13th Shanghai Biennale, Power Station of Art, Shanghai, China, 2021.

Image: Diane Severin Nguyen production still. Photo: Dawid Misiorny.