For the first time, Diane Severin Nguyen’s short films Tyrant Star (2019) and IF REVOLUTION IS A SICKNESS (2021) are screened together with an excerpt from the artist’s upcoming film, In Her Time (2023). Departing from K-pop culture in Poland, re-enactment of historical war scenes in a Chinese film studio, vlogging and Vietnamese folk poems, Nguyen’s video work interrogates the multivalent histories of power, trauma and elation that shapes the images we surround ourselves with.

After the screening, Nguyen will be joined by writer, researcher and co-curator for the event, Marie-Alix Isdahl, for a conversation about the artist’s recently completed trilogy.

The screening is presented by Kunstnernes Hus Kino in collaboration with MOMENTUM 12 Biennale and Marie-Alix Isdahl. The event is supported by the Fritt Ord Foundation and Oslo City Council for Cultural Affairs.

Tyrant Star, 2019
Length: 16min
Country: Vietnam, USA
Language: Vietnamese, English
Subtitles: English

Tyrant Star is a short film that unfolds in three chapters, beginning with a view of the streets of Ho Chi Minh City set to a ca dao poem about star-crossed lovers, before shifting to a Vietnamese YouTube star performing a cover version of The Sound of Silence and concluding with footage from an orphanage. The film highlights subtle movements, fragmented bodies, and how songs and shared histories are woven together in new ways over time.
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IF REVOLUTION IS A SICKNESS, 2021
Length: 19min
Country: USA, Poland
Language: Polish, Vietnamese, English
Subtitles: English

Set in Warsaw, the short film follows the character of an orphaned Vietnamese girl who grows up to be absorbed into a K-pop dance group. Moving between a first-person narrative accompanied by revolutionary texts, near-abstraction and music video, the film questions how self-actualization can take place in the unifying and contradictory realms of representation.
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In Her time, 2023
Length: 15min (excerpt from 60min)
Language: Chinese, English
Country: China
Subtitles: English

An excerpt from the upcoming In Her Time will be shown during the event. Set in China's largest film studio, Hengdian World Studios, Nguyen’s latest and longest film to date follows the journey of an actress as she prepares for the leading role in a historical war drama. Confession, rehearsal and performance are interwoven to unveil a complex portrait of an artist who must re-enact pain to express her ideal vision of the future.

Diane Severin Nguyen is an American-Vietnamese artist who works with photography, video, and installation. Through material and sculptural experimentations, Nguyen approaches the photographic moment as one of transformation. The artist is particularly interested in exceeding photography as a mode of documentation and engages with it rather as a set of conditions shaped by desire and speculation. Her video work narrativizes these tensions by examining the histories of power, victimhood, and forms of propaganda that underpin cultural (and self) image-making.

Nguyen has exhibited her work internationally, in places like SculptureCenter, The Renaissance Society, the Rockbund Museum, MoMA PS1, the Carnegie Museum of Art, the Schinkel Pavilion, Jeu du Paume, the Hammer Museum, and many others. Her films have been screened at film festivals such as the New York Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam, and Berlinale. Nguyen is a recent recipient of the 2023 Guggenheim fellowship and lives and works in New York.

Marie-Alix Isdahl is a French-Norwegian writer and researcher who lives and works in London. She is a PhD candidate in the Department of Fine Art at Goldsmiths, where she is currently completing a hybrid theory-practice doctoral project with support from the Henry Moore Foundation and others. Her research investigates materiality, desire and the production of visibility (and opacity) within extractive regimes. As co-founder of gallery SCHLOSS, she has organised many exhibitions and events within the arts in Oslo and internationally, and as a member of Institute for Scene Experiments, has taken part in projects at Camden Arts Centre, London (2023) and KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin (2022). She holds an MA in critical theory from Goldsmiths and is a critical studies tutor in the BFA programme at Goldsmiths since 2021.

Nikhil Vettukattil is a British-Indian artist and writer who lives and works in Oslo. He has written a prompt for the conversation between Nguyen and Isdahl. Vettukattil’s practice questions modes of representation and image-making processes in their relation to lived experiences. He is the founder of Institute for Scene Experiments and as part of Tenthaus, is the co-curator of the MOMENTUM 12 Biennale.