I enter the room and am already off-balance. A glove floats in liquid. Light trembles across a fragile sculpture made from found objects. A stage with yellow latex curtains stands tilted toward the entrance, as if in a scene from David Lynch’s apotheotic journey through the uncanny, Twin Peaks. Somewhere in the world, a body hesitates on a bridge, poised between exposure and concealment. Nothing waits to be explained; everything is here to be felt. Diane Severin Nguyen’s exhibition at FoMu Antwerp amplifies this atmosphere, creating an environment that is at once cinematic, material, and profoundly insistent on an encompassing understanding of the viewer’s bodily and perceptual engagement.
Diane Severin Nguyen, IF REVOLUTION IS A SICKNESS, installation view at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, 2023. Source: Glasstire, Texas Online Platform for Visual Arts.
Red carpet swallows everything in the room. It infiltrates the film, stains the photographs, and settles into the architecture itself. Red is never a neutral color. It carries historical inscriptions: revolutionary flags, the iconography of socialist states, the symbolic residue of blood as sacrifice—and as continuity. For Nguyen, flags and stars operate as abstractions of belonging, compressing collective experience into signs that are legible yet inscribed with contradictions. They condense identity, solidarity, aspiration, and authority into reproducible symbols that bind individuals to imagined communities while also staging their ambivalence. Symbols, in Nguyen’s handling, meander along a semiotic river of interlegibility.
IF REVOLUTION IS A SICKNESS opens with images of an orphaned Vietnamese girl washing ashore against an indeterminate European landscape. A male voice calls her name: Weronika. A sentimental melody underscores a sense of longing—a call for belonging to “the West”. Years later, in Warsaw, Weronika Nguyen—the name of a real person the artist found on Instagram by typing the combination of the commonest Polish first name and the commonest Vietnamese last name—moves through a world structured by exclusion and desire. Taken in by a group of teenage K-pop dancers, whose choreography oscillates between solidarity and cruelty, she navigates a landscape marked by Soviet-era monuments, abandoned fountains, illegal skate parks, and other reminders of state power. Clad in crimson sportswear, the group performs their high stakes dances with a precision that is simultaneously alluring and imperious, playful and threatening.
This tension between the collective and the individual resolves into a simple yet unsettling question: what does it mean to belong to a group? Groups provide recognition, visibility, and power, yet they demand conformity. “You need the group,” Nguyen reflects in conversation with the curator Zeynep Kubat. “But sometimes in order to have political power you have to flatten differences. There’s always something you lose when you gain the power of circulation.” Assimilation feels ambivalent, both empowering and violent, all the while the desire to belong remains unavoidable: “You just want to move your body the way the group moves. There’s this fantasy that if you inhabit the right form, you can become part of history.”
Diane Severin Nguyen. Stills from IF REVOLUTION IS A SICKNESS, 2021. Courtesy of the artist.
Warsaw itself, with its layered post-socialist topography, is crucial to this exploration of identity and ideology. The Vietnamese community based there arrived as a historical artifact of Cold War alliances, in particular labor migration, imperialist warfare, and educational exchanges. Sustained political ties forged during the communist era have left enduring social and spatial patterns. Nguyen first encountered this geopolitical entanglement as personal memory: as a child, she often heard her mother singing a Vietnamese song about Poland, praising “the land of Chopin and Marie Curie” and celebrating friendship between the two nations. Only later did she realize that this song was a relic of socialist internationalism—a musical articulation of historical intermingling at once sentimental and politically charged. “When two big ideologies fight it out and neither really works,” Nguyen observes, “you end up with a deep distrust of ideology itself.”
The stage hosts the film IF REVOLUTION IS A SICKNESS, which has been touring in exhibitions such as “Musafiri” at HKW Berlin as well as film festivals including the Berlinale and Open City Documentary since its debut at the Sculpture Center in New York in 2021. Around the screen, a constellation of photographs are positioned as a component of the film’s atmosphere rather than being mere adornment for the moving image. Other works insist on occupying the tension between a consciously constructed appearance and the intense presence of historical and affective afterlives; for example, Ambitious Descent (2020), in which Chinese ritual currency burns in slow, luminous collapse; Cruel Cute (2023), wherein hair-like materials, feathers, and fruit peels assemble into compositionally ambiguous surfaces; in Thirst for Love (2024), a broken egg stands poised between delicate reality and staging; and Workers Bouquet (2025), combines organic and synthetic elements into compositions that are at once excessive and unresolved. These photographs create a thickly layered field in which every detail—surface, color, texture, and composition—carries associative histories. Fake snow makes frequent appearances in these images, as an emotionally charged, omnipresent material that suspends time for the artist.
Ambivalences are also suspended throughout the film: a graffitied fountain where the word “tolerance” is partially erased; a fascist sun cross etched into concrete; balloons spelling “1989” sinking into water; a body suspended at the edge of a rooftop—poised between play and violence. These are not narrative elements in the conventional sense, but rather fragments charged with the historical weight of post-socialist disillusionment, nationalist recrudescence, and the persistence of ideological symbols that refuse to settle into the past. The choreography of the dance group echoes both contemporary social media performance and older forms of collective discipline, channeling Siegfried Kracauer’s notion of mass ornament. In Kracauer’s formulation, from the Weimar era, collective spectacle organizes and aestheticizes mass behavior. In Nguyen’s film, this principle is displaced into a networked contemporary condition, where gestures circulate digitally as well as physically. They are simultaneously visible and atomized. Again, Nguyen inhabits this tension, allowing it to accumulate across surfaces, bodies, and affective atmospheres.
Carrie Mae Weems, Leave Now!, 2022. Video installation; from “Carrie Mae Weems: The Heart of the Matter”. © Carrie Mae Weems and reproduced courtesy the artist and Gladstone Gallery, New York, Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco, and Galerie Barbara Thumm, Berlin.
On the same evening of the screening, Carrie Mae Weems’ The Heart of Matter opened as a compelling counterpoint. It, too, features a stage: red curtains, theatricality, and careful, spatial choreography to frame her narrative explorations. In Leave Now! (2022), a video installation resembling an old cinema, she and her sister recount the ordeal of their grandfather Frank, a sharecropper and member of the Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union in Arkansas. After being beaten and left for dead in 1936, he escapes north on foot, losing his land, and, temporarily, his family. Weems foregrounds the body in the work, and her staging choices underscore histories of racialized violence and collective memory. Weems returns consistently to the self as subject, insisting on the legibility of history through personification. While Weems engages the photographic image as a site of historical reckoning—foregrounding the archive, the staging of the body, and the politics of representation—Nguyen’s film treats history as something less stable, less narratable. The two exhibitions intersect and diverge conceptually: they probe how images carry the world, and how they also destabilize it.
Photography, in Nguyen’s hands, becomes the site where transformations are most acute. Her works insist on an ambient sedimentation that resists immediate recognition, creating surfaces that are materially and visually dense, charged with history and affect. Objects—strawberries, costumes, stars, and flags—do not merely stand in for ideas; they operate as active nodes, sometimes as subjects in their own right, amidst a network of meanings, linking gestures, social frameworks, and histories of extraction and subordination that reach across time and space. Subjects perform for the camera in ways that exceed their immediate presence, carrying traces of labor, repetition, and symbolic circulation. Their images look unmistakably constructed, produced with an intensity that evokes what Walter Benjamin described as “aura”—not as an inherent property of the object, but as something that emerges in the encounter with the image.
Nguyen relocates the notion of aura within a contemporary regime of image production, where reproducibility is no longer antithetical to uniqueness, but rather enmeshed with it. Her reflections on photogenicity become crucial here. Certain materials perform for the camera in ways that exceed their presence in the world. Such performance is not innocent, and, similarly, neither is K-pop. The form is historically entangled with the development of photographic, military, and social disciplinary technologies. The perfected K-pop image carries within it the conditions of its own possibility. To photograph something is already to participate in a network of visibility shaped by power, by circulation, by the desire to capture and to be captured.
Cover Image: Diane Severin Nguyen. Stills from IF REVOLUTION IS A SICKNESS, 2021. Courtesy of the artist.
IF REVOLUTION IS A SICKNESS demands repeated viewing. This is not a matter of clarifying a hidden narrative, but instead a means to allow embedded correspondences to emerge. The protagonist’s position remains unstable—both central and marginal, necessary and expendable—reflecting broader cultural mechanisms in which identification with suffering becomes a mode of engagement, even of enjoyment, and resonating with a fraught, almost paradoxical, proximity between Georges Bataille and Simone Weil—two thinkers who negotiated the intellectual and political milieu of 1930s France. Though their worlds ultimately diverged, their stories briefly intersected through the revolutionary group and eponymous journal Contre-Attaque.
Having worked in factories and briefly joined anarchist militias during the Spanish Civil War, Weil approached revolution as an ethical necessity, almost an ascetic endeavor grounded in attention to bodily suffering and self-effacement. She grew suspicious of collective movements, which often reproduced the violence they purported to resist. Bataille, by contrast and by privilege, was drawn precisely to that which exceeds ethical containment. Where Weil sought to purify revolution, Bataille was fascinated by its overflow, its violence, its ecstatic dissolution of order, and its capacity to undo the rational structures that govern everyday life. His notion of “sovereignty” was not about political control but about moments in which utility collapses. Revolution, in Bataille’s sense, was less a moral project than an eruption—something closer to contagion than to program.
The brief convergence of these two in anti-fascist writing illustrates a shared intensity channeled in opposite directions. The conceptual core of Nguyen’s film mirrors this duality: belonging to a collective can be both seductive and violent; revolution can be equally generative as it is consuming. As a title, IF REVOLUTION IS A SICKNESS, captures this tension—feverish conformity and infectious excess coexist, circulating through gestures, symbols, and imagery.
Cover Image: Diane Severin Nguyen. Stills from IF REVOLUTION IS A SICKNESS, 2021. Courtesy of the artist.
Nguyen’s upcoming project Powerless, to be presented at Haus der Kunst, extends her questions into a larger register. In the work, a helicopter chase staged in the Bavarian Alps introduces both scale and visibility as a means of engaging the aesthetics of war and spectacle. The helicopter, suspended between rescue and destruction, becomes a signifier through which questions of perception, empathy, and power are refracted. The project recalls the strange production history of Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now: helicopters used in the film were intermittently recalled by the Philippine military to conduct operations against insurgents before being returned to the set. The cinematic representation of war and the deployment of real state violence circulate through the same devices, the same landscapes, and the same choreography of bodies and machines. Indeed, Vietnam itself became a stage where Cold War divisions were violently enacted, embedding geopolitical contingency into visual memory.
People often turn to films as if the moving image could stabilize history, believing that the cinema might finally give form to what may be chaotic, distant, or unbearable. Nguyen unsettles such expectations. In her films and installations, history does not resolve into narrative; it circulates, like any other reel. It clings to gestures, props, songs, and landscapes, appearing in fragments—half-remembered, misdirected, or restaged under slightly altered conditions. The question, for her, is less whether an image is real or fabricated; that distinction quickly becomes secondary. What matters is how an image gathers force, how it carries traces of other images, other conflicts, other desires.
IF REVOLUTION IS A SICKNESS runs at FoMu Antwerp until June 7, 2026.
Diane Severin Nguyen’s exhibition at Haus der Kunst in Munich is scheduled to open October 20, 2026 and runs until May 16, 2027.
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Diane Severin Nguyen. Stills from IF REVOLUTION IS A SICKNESS, 2021. Courtesy of the artist
