IN DIANE SEVERIN NGUYEN’S PORTFOLIO for Artforum the artist shares a selection of production stills shot by photographer Dawid Misiorny while Nguyen was filming If Revolution Is a Sickness, 2021. The video, set in Warsaw, appears in Nguyen’s first solo institutional exhibition, at New York’s SculptureCenter. (The show is co-organized with Chicago’s Renaissance Society, where it will open in the spring.) Just a few blocks away, at MoMA PS1, Nguyen is participating in the fifth edition of Greater New York, which opens later this month.
If Revolution Is a Sickness begins with an orphaned Vietnamese girl washing ashore in an unidentified European country. Years later, isolated and alone in Warsaw, she is taken in by a crew of teenage K-pop fans. Clad in revolutionary crimson and goth sportswear, the scrappy gang performs sinister, synchronized choreography against a backdrop of Soviet monuments, Stalinist architecture, and illegal skate parks.
In one image, two dancers perch on a dilapidated fountain. Spray paint covers the concrete edifice, and though the swirls of graffiti may imply a makeshift public forum—a collision of diverse and competing voices, in harmony and dissensus—violence mars the surface: A vandal has drawn a so-called sun cross, a symbol of the fascist far right. A second picture further alludes to the burst hopes of neoliberal democracy, as four Mylar balloons—cheerfully spelling out “1989”—sink to watery depths.
Underpinning Nguyen’s video is the theme of the individual and the group: the need to belong versus the cruelty of the clique, the threat of loneliness versus the anonymity of the crowd. The teens’ mundane hazing and bullying, directed against their Vietnamese-Polish peer, are constitutive to the formation of national identity, while the tight choreography may alternately suggest a communal bid for TikTok stardom or a disciplining of bodies into alienated abstractions.
“The hands in the factory correspond to the legs of the Tiller Girls,” Siegfried Krakauer wrote in 1927. Yet the bodies in If Revolution Is a Sickness are no mass ornament, with its links to centralized capitalist rationalization; instead, they point to a new, more elusive kind of emblem—an image of the painful erasure and demands for representation that undergird our networked and atomized present.
