Diane Severin Nguyen dedicates her artistic practice to the transitional states and circulation processes of identities, emotions, objects, and mediatized images. Her photographs, videos, and installations draw on a wide variety of sources, making use of organic materials, civilizational waste, political philosophies, and the visual worlds and self-representations of social media. In her work IF REVOLUTION IS A SICKNESS (2021), the loose narrative framework involves a Vietnamese orphan girl in Poland who grows up isolated, later meeting a group of like-minded teenagers through her love of K-Pop, which is extremely popular in Poland. Together, they rehearse a music videoesque dance routine. But there is much more to see and hear in the process: a text collage with quotes from revolutionary authors ranging from Ulrike Meinhof to Hannah Arendt and Édouard Glissant, to Polish poets such as Czesław Miłosz; a multi-layered soundtrack of noises and music; images of abandoned landscapes and derelict sites; emblematic locations such as Warsaw’s Jewish Cemetery or the Warsaw Uprising Monument and the Stalinist Palace of Culture, both of which serve as backdrops for the teenagers’ dance moves; and, again and again, fleeting snapshots of nature. Through her highly stylized amalgamation of fragments of cultural meaning, Nguyen creates a kaleidoscope of harsh contradictions and delicate touches that is simultaneously melancholic and hypnotic. Past and present ideologies, youthful desires and rebellions, diasporic experiences and national symbols, Eastern European and Asian geographies, the traumas of the Second World War, the Cold War, and the Vietnam War become inextricably intertwined through a repertoire of signs, gestures, and affects that circulate through global networks and pop cultures.

Work in the exhibition: IF REVOLUTION IS A SICKNESS (2021), 1-channel video in 4K, 19'. Courtesy of the artist