Diane Severin Nguyen: Solo Exhibition

Diane Severin Nguyen (b. 1990, Carson City, California) will stage a theatrical and sonic performance alongside a presentation of a newly commissioned installation, with selections from her genre-defying films. Curated by ICA Assistant Curator Egbert Vongmalaithong, the exhibition will explore the artist’s current trajectory, which considers histories of victimhood, propaganda, and sentimentality through popular forms of media and image-making.

Diane Severin Nguyen works across photography, video, and installation, approaching the photographic moment as one of transformation. Moving beyond documentation, she engages photography as a moment of tension, shaped by desire, speculation, and material instability. Her video work extends these concerns, examining power, victimhood, and propaganda as forces that shape both cultural and self image. Nguyen’s practice has been described as a “commitment to transience” with subjects that, though grotesque and painful, are also beautiful—like a pupa taking on the new shape and biology of a moth. Nguyen has exhibited her work internationally and lives and works in New York.