Vietnamese-American artist Diane Severin Nguyen (b. 1990, California, USA) premieres an entirely new body of work centred on a new film and accompanied by photography, sculpture and a participatory kinetic installation. The exhibition extends Nguyen’s inquiry into the politics of victimhood and what the artist calls "the double bind of the sentimental gaze" where brutalised subjects are simultaneously encouraged and punished for expressions of vulnerability. She asks how perceptions of war and violence become part of contemporary selfhood.
At the core of Nguyen’s practice lies an urgency to invent new aesthetic languages. For her, the question is not how to escape images, but how to live through them. “We make life through images,” she notes, proposing beauty, affect, and fantasy not as evasions of truth but as ways of constructing it.
The new film takes flight as the viewer is caught between sky and ground in a moving pursuit. Sentiment merges with machinery and music becomes a force. One is suspended within an atmosphere where compassion and domination are no longer opposed, but continuous. The exhibition brings this instability into physical space, placing us inside the mechanics of witnessing itself.
The film is commissioned by Haus der Kunst München, Hessel Museum of Art at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, New York, and The Vega Foundation, Toronto.
Curated by Xue Tan with Lydia Antoniou