Join the ICA for a special screening of Diane Severin Nguyen’s films Tyrant Star, IF REVOLUTION IS A SICKNESS, and In Her Time (Iris’s Version). Presented as part of Nguyen’s Fall 2026 exhibition, WAR SONGS duet, this marks the first time these three films will be screened together as a trilogy. 

The films examine the afterlives of wartime events, including the Vietnam War, the Cold War, and the Nanjing Massacre, in relation to pop culture. Each film centers on a fictional character whose inner world unfolds through a different performative medium—singing, dancing, or acting—revealing how political consciousness and identity are constructed and mediated through performance.

Following the screening, Egbert Vongmalaithong, Assistant Curator of the Institute for Contemporary Art at VCU, will be joined by Tesora Molina-Garcia, Associate Professor in Photography and Film, for a conversation about Nguyen’s work.

Tyrant Star, 2019
16 min

Filmed entirely in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, Tyrant Star prompts viewers to consider how cultural touchstones like songs and shared histories are fragmented and woven together in new ways over time. The work unfolds in three chapters, beginning with a view of the metropolis set to ca dao, or Vietnamese folk poems, before shifting to an aspiring YouTube star performing a cover of “The Sound of Silence” and concluding with footage of children at a Ho Chi Minh City orphanage. Although each chapter focuses on different voices and perspectives, they are linked by messages of grief and care that remain unheard or misunderstood, and by reminders of pain, isolation, and trauma. Nguyen’s camera captures trash-strewn landscapes, quiet interiors, and fragmented bodies, highlighting subtle movements that suggest our surroundings are alive, swelling with the memories of the past.

IF REVOLUTION IS A SICKNESS, 2021
19 min

Set in Warsaw, Poland, IF REVOLUTION IS A SICKNESS 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. Spilling over from first-person narrative into near-abstraction and music video, Nguyen traverses the complicated beauty and multivalent forms of propaganda that underpin cultural (and self) image-making.

In Her Time (Iris’s Version), 2024
67 min

In Her Time (Iris’s Version) follows the titular actress as she rehearses for a leading role in a historical war film about the Nanjing Massacre of 1937, a brutal assault on
Chinese civilians by the Imperial Japanese army during the Second Sino-Japanese War
(1937–45). Through this framework, Nguyen explores the ways that history
circulates in the present—largely through popular media, partly as memory, and partly
as re-creation or even fan fiction. The doubling back and collapsing of time includes even the actress’s retrospective commentary about the making of In Her Time alongside her own private iPhone footage.