Vietnamese-American artist Diane Severin Nguyen (b. 1990, California) premieres a new body of work centred on the film installation Powerless. A kinetic installation in the Mittelhalle and a photographic environment in the Südgalerie extend its exploration of victimhood, identity and the entanglement of intimacy with power.
With a background in visual art and political science, Nguyen examines how personal memory and historical trauma are understood through contemporary visual culture. She asks how images of war become part of everyday perception and contemporary selfhood. For Nguyen, the question is not how to escape images or history, but how to live through them. With her work, she challenges the machinery of image-making and creates new artistic languages, not as evasions of truth but as ways of reconstructing it.
Set in the Bavarian Alps, the film installation Powerless follows a child who leaves home against the wishes of her absent mother, whose voice moves between tenderness, apology and command. Overhead, a helicopter carries an American folk band whose wistful songs romanticise freedom and rescue. Implicated in the destruction of her home, the machine also promises escape. As she approaches it, familial longing and militarised vision from above converge, blurring care and control.
Powerless asks how victimhood becomes a basis for identity: how wounds make us recognisable to ourselves, institutions and history, granting moral authority even in the absence of material power. Nguyen’s “double bind of the sentimental gaze” describes how vulnerable subjects are both encouraged and punished for expressing their pain. The figure of the child concentrates these tensions in the image of innocence: a claim invoked both to justify war and to demand its end, yet unable to settle the meaning of the violence it reveals.
Body-worn cameras, surveillance cameras and aerial footage place the viewer within this unstable field of attention. Evoking widely circulated images of rescue and evacuation from the Vietnam War, the helicopter is both an image and a way of seeing, transforming the landscape into a map, stage or target. These historical echoes connect with the ways we encounter war through screens today: violence can appear remote or virtual while remaining bodily and irreversible. Technologies that promise objective evidence offer no certainty about responsibility or care.
In the Mittelhalle, a kinetic installation repeatedly launches doll-like figures onto a stage, where they accumulate throughout the day. Its mechanical rhythm echoes the helicopter’s relentless circling, suspending the spectacle between play and catastrophe. In the Südgalerie, photographs made with surveillance cameras turn images of evidence into fugitive forms, their bodies unstable and shifting.
This exhibition continues our programme’s exploration of liveness in contemporary artistic practice, particularly through expanded forms of moving image, connecting previous projects by Cyprien Gaillard, Pan Daijing and Wang Shui. Powerless also introduces our 2027 programme focus: artists’ photography and image-making amid technological change.
Curated by Xue Tan with Lydia Antoniou
The film installation Powerless by Diane Severin Nguyen is co-commissioned by Haus der Kunst München; The Hessel Museum of Art, Bard College, New York; The Vega Foundation, Toronto; the Alexander Tutsek-Stiftung, Munich; LUMA Foundation; and Chisenhale Gallery, London.
The film is produced by if…Productions Film GmbH.
- Production Design: Renate Schmaderer
- Production Design Team: Luzi Speth, Lukas Katholik, Yuki Tobiyama
- Cinematography & Visual Effects: Nikolai Huber
- Original Music & Sound Design: Laszlo Horvath
- Wardrobe: Katrin Bobek
- Producers: Ingo Fliess & Jonas Egert
- Line Producer: Luzie Lohmeyer
- Post-production: ARTCORE
- Conform, Colour Grading, Mastering & DCP Creation: Julian Nouveau
- Sound Editing, Design, Mixing & On-site Sound Mixing: Yohann Henry
- Starring Emilie Khanuengnit Phalamat, Laszlo Horvath, Janine Gierszewsky, Leona Grundig, Peter Thoma & Yuki Tobiyama
- Voices: Corinne Harfouch, Pei Barthes Wu (Voice of the child), Emily Schubert (Voice for score)
The Alexander Tutsek-Stiftung is the major supporter of this exhibition.
Artist info
Diane Severin Nguyen
Diane Severin Nguyen (b. 1990, Carson, California) lives and works in New York. Her films, photographs, performances, and installations create images where the intimate and the ideological converge. Nguyen's work often examines how representation produces identity and power, and the fantasies of nationhood and victimhood that sustain war and propaganda. Her work has been exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York), MoMA PS1 (New York), the Renaissance Society (Chicago), Jeu de Paume (Paris), and screened at Berlinale and the New York Film Festival. A 2023 Guggenheim Fellow, she continues to expand the possibilities of image-making and perception.