Diane Severin Nguyen: IF REVOLUTION IS A SICKNESS / Niloufar Emamifar, SoiL Thornton, and an Oral History of Knobkerry

Diane Severin Nguyen: IF REVOLUTION IS A SICKNESS
September 16–December 13, 2021

IF REVOLUTION IS A SICKNESS, Diane Severin Nguyen’s first solo institutional exhibition, features a new moving image work co-commissioned by SculptureCenter and the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago. Set in Warsaw, Poland, the film loosely follows the character of an orphaned Vietnamese child who grows up to be absorbed into a South Korean pop-inspired dance group. Widely popular within a Polish youth subculture, K-pop is used by the artist as a vernacular material to trace a relationship between Eastern Europe and Asia with roots in Cold War allegiances.

This dichotomy of the East and the West is further complicated by the significant Vietnamese diaspora currently living in Poland, composed of Northerners who migrated before the fall of the Iron Curtain, and Southerners who came in the aftermath of the Vietnam War. While such inherited divisions may be invisible to the majority culture in which they are situated, Nguyen traces how these layered inner conflicts are reckoned with in the process of finding shared symbols and naming oneself from within another’s regime.

For the project, Nguyen assembled a crew of teenaged Polish dancers who perform original choreography set to music and lyrics co-written by the artist. Projected into the pomp of a red and yellow stage, Nguyen’s video probes the paradoxes inherent to the artist’s distinctive approach to making photographs, several of which are on view in the exhibition: Can self-actualization happen within the unifying realm of representation? How can a medium that excludes or suppresses parts of reality exceed the failures and omissions of language? Central to both moving image and photographic work is the question of the contingency of subject formation in relationship to representational media.

The melodramatic pull of the spectacle is disrupted by the voice over culled from various and often contradictory writings on revolution by Ulrike Meinhof, Hanna Arendt, Mao Zendong among others. The text and the image function on two different registers and not in the service of one another. The work uses this internal tension and shows how a single entity could be used for potentially diametrically opposed ends. Propaganda or blockbuster, self actualization or commodification, asceticism or exuberance.

The exhibition is curated by Sohrab Mohebbi, curator-at-Large, and is co-organized with the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago, where it will be on view in spring 2022. The Chicago presentation is curated by Myriam Ben Salah, Director and Chief Curator. A publication—the artist’s first—will accompany the exhibition.

Related programming
Diane Severin Nguyen and Sohrab Mohebbi in Conversation
October 28, 2021

Niloufar Emamifar, SoiL Thornton, and an Oral History of Knobkerry
October 14–December 13, 2021

Niloufar Emamifar, SoiL Thornton, and an Oral History of Knobkerry brings artists Niloufar Emamifar and SoiL Thornton into proximity with the history of Knobkerry, a store founded and run by artist and designer Sara Penn (1927–2020) in New York City from the 1960s through the 1990s. Foundational to the exhibition at SculptureCenter is a years-long oral history project, conceived and developed by writer and oral historian Svetlana Kitto, that begins to demarcate a potential sphere of influence for Penn, her work, and her store, which was known for its distinctive juxtaposition of clothing, materials, and artifacts, and for Penn’s deep expertise in global and historical textiles. Featuring new work made for the occasion by Emamifar and Thornton, the exhibition as a whole functions as a collaborative form of research between a curator, an oral historian, and artists whose work might be understood in new dimensions were Penn better represented in our recent histories of sculpture, installation, commerce, fashion, and artist-run institutions.

First opened in the East Village during the major social and economic transformations of the 1960s, Knobkerry traded in textiles and ethnographic objects, which Penn expertly transformed into coveted patchwork garments and arranged in elaborate and densely layered displays. In Penn’s hands, these items registered the local effects of globalization, including increased access to objects of international trade, eager markets for fashionable multiculturalism, and a conflicted relationship to American identity. Intimately produced with her singular expertise and craftsmanship, Penn’s work was publicly lauded, circulated, copied, and codified as the archetypal “hippie” style by celebrities and mainstream press outlets. At the same time the store served as an important physical and social space for a network of Black intellectuals, musicians, and artists, and for a broader subset of cultural and subcultural figures passing through New York.

Sara Penn and Knobkerry are represented by a publication that collects fifteen long-form interviews with figures close to Knobkerry, conducted by Kitto between 2017 and 2020. The book also includes extensive reproductions of archival materials related to Penn and the store, collected by Kitto in collaboration with Penn and a number of her close relations. SoiL Thornton and Niloufar Emamifar will each present new work for the exhibition. Through relatively unstructured methods (Emamifar and Thornton were not prompted to make work directly in response to Knobkerry, for example), the exhibition aims to open a new conversation and propose further engagement with Penn’s legacy—and to evade often overdetermined institutional claims of rediscovery.

The exhibition is curated by Kyle Dancewicz, Interim Director.

Related programming
Knobkerry Roundtable
October 7, 2021

Shopkeeping
December 2, 2021

The production of Nguyen’s video work in Poland was supported by U–jazdowski Residencies, Warsaw.
Diane Severin Nguyen: IF REVOLUTION IS A SICKNESS is supported in part by the Polish Cultural Institute New York.
For more information, please visit sculpture-center.org.