Alison Nguyen: Prosthetic Memory

gdm Taipei is pleased to present Alison Nguyen: Prosthetic Memory, the artist’s first major exhibition in Asia. The immersive installation brings together two bodies of work which explores the complex relationship between media, individual histories, and the politics of cultural memory.

In two rooms walled with glistening and semi-opaque industrial PVC curtains, Alison Nguyen’s Prosthetic Memory brings together two works that elevate the absurd in a timely rendering of dreams and memories sustained in the face of censorious compartmentalization and the prospect of severance from consciousness, memory, and history.

Across from a limousine cut in half and the aroma of the fresh dirt lining it, history as hypnosis is presented in a triptych. The yellow on orange poem “Cu,” by the artist’s brother Matthew Nguyen, unravels an absurd narrative, in which the story starts to fray at the seams, as if it were the navel of a dream. We barely catch a glimpse of a decaying American dream through cliches like the core memory of the prom limo, the motivational pep of “lighten up, it’s the thought that counts,” and the immigrant strife encapsulated in “or maybe you’re just trying to learn English and get a job”. The narrative of a childhood outing in a limo is interrupted by Chu’s and Cu’s, voices from a different language, eerie and repetitive like a bird call, or an error script calling upon yet unable to conjure the long aftermaths of the American War in Vietnam.

While the narrative seems to run on some transmutation of memory, the moving image contemplates its complete severance, mechanically, traumatically. The blue lit limo slowly drives through a cold carwash as three women in various forms of white care labor attire sit in the back seat, a dead man’s body in the soil underneath their feet. The limo’s route from a desert canyon to the depths of the urban landscape, rest stops, cell phone stores, strip malls, laundromats, and karaoke bars, follows these women, in search of a man named X, through an awkward reintegration into the material world and its sociality. With their blackened teeth and long white earphones delivering monotone and didactic tech-speak, the women face a squalid American landscape that is rife with threatening gestures that recall the memory erased: a helicopter above, questioning eyes wondering who they are, a barber pointing a hairdryer towards them as if it were a gun.

In the next room, material is fragmented across a green factory floor surrounded by yellow PVC walls. The main video Aisle 9 displayed on a single screen is flanked by A-frame carts that bear its archival and conceptual scaffolding: citations, credits, licensing documents for a previously censored love song used in the film, customs paperwork for the artwork in the exhibition. Aisle 9 is set in a family-owned hosiery factory where Helena, the matriarch of the company, has rented out part of their space to a start-up, World Global Services, in order to avoid layoffs. As mysterious boxes begin accumulating in the large vacant areas, the workers continue their daily socialization, working, smoking, and playing archery. One night, an arrow sails into Aisle 9, pierces one of the boxes, and the staff slowly realize that they are in the midst of the stuff of people’s everyday life: video diaries, home movies, artist films, and prosumer content that have been censored by the government, boxed up, shipped away. “Niệm Khúc Cuối” (The Last Song) is the first memory that is unearthed from these boxes, a song that was banned in Vietnam not because it was too political but because it was too romantic, not patriotic enough. The workers turn Aisle 9 into a viewing station, adding to their night time activities the intake and study of these memories. 

Prosthetic Memory references Allison Landberg’s book by the same name, which argues that through mass media, people may acquire the experience of historical events that they themselves did not live through. The workers of Aisle 9 transform a censorious process of a state regime in which memories are severed from their organic containers, made prosthetic. Even as they re-enter circulation, they are mediated by screens, disembodied. 

The exhibition ends with a textile work taking the deadpan form of a hanging political flag. The embroidered text stems from Nguyen’s engagement with the work of theorist, writer, and activist Silvia Federici, known for her research into the intersection of capitalism, labor, and gender. In dialogue with Federici, Alison Nguyen embroiders a stanza of her 1985 poem “In Praise of Conspiracy Theory” onto the flag: 

Come, then,
let us sing praises
to the conspiracy theory of history.
For as long as there are men
who sit and plan deeds
that cause any of us to die,
no conceptual flight
or verbal trick
will stop me from concluding
they are conspiring against us.

Text by Lara Fresko Madra

Assistant Professor and Luma Fellow at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College

Alison Nguyen (b. 1986) is visual artist and filmmaker working across video, installation, performance, and sculpture. Her work, often speculative, absurd, and performative, is strongly grounded in the real. She combines the particulars of the personal with an exploration into broader forces of history, specifically those entwined with technology.

Nguyen’s work has been presented at the Museum of Modern Art; MIT List Center for Visual Arts; National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Korea; e-flux; Frieze Seoul Film; The International Studio & Curatorial Program; Ann Arbor Film Festival, among others.

Alison Nguyen received her MFA in Visual Art from Columbia University and her BA in Literary Arts from Brown University. Nguyen is a 2023–24 Studio Artist at the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program.