Diane Severin Nguyen. Powerless

Press release

Haus der Kunst presents “Powerless”, the most ambitious project to date by Vietnamese-American artist Diane Severin Nguyen (b. 1990, California, USA). The exhibition invites visitors into a world of seductive beauty and strange, unsettling contradictions. Centred on Nguyen’s new film installation Powerless, the exhibition unfolds across the Mittelhalle and the Südgalerie through a kinetic installation and a photographic environment, exploring the uneasy entanglement of intimacy, vulnerability, and power.

With a background in visual art and political science, Nguyen examines how individual memory and collective histories 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.

Curated by Xue Tan with Lydia Antoniou.

The Alexander Tutsek-Stifting is the major supporter of Diane Severin Nguyen's exhibition.

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; LUMA Foundation; Chisenhale Gallery, London; and the Alexander Tutsek-Stiftung, Munich.

The film is produced by if…Productions Film GmbH.

Duration

20.11.26 – 16.5.27

Downloads

Press Release (DE)

Download PDF (1.00 MB)