Diane Severin Nguyen

Diane Severin Nguyen is an artist living and working in New York. Her practice often explores how images shape identity and power, and the fantasies of nationhood and victimhood that underpin war and propaganda. For her first solo exhibition in the UK, Nguyen presents Powerless, a video installation filmed in the Bavarian Alps. Seen primarily through surveillance, drone, and body-worn cameras, a child leaves home against her mother’s wishes and moves through an idyllic landscape as a helicopter circles above. Carrying an American folk band whose wistful songs romanticise rescue, the helicopter offers at once an escape and a recruitment. Familial longing and military vision converge, blurring care and control.