Diane Severin Nguyen: WAR SONGS duet

Diane Severin Nguyen: WAR SONGS duet
September 18, 2026 – February 21, 2027
True Farr Luck Gallery 4

Diane Severin Nguyen (b. 1990, Carson City, California) works across photography, video, and installation, approaching the photographic moment as one of transformation. Moving beyond documentation, she engages photography as a site of tension, shaped by desire, speculation, and material instability. Her video work extends these concerns, examining how power, victimhood, and propaganda shape both cultural images and self-perception. WAR SONGS duet is an adaptation of Severin Nguyen’s performance piece WAR SONGS, which was commissioned by the 2025 Performa Biennial. WAR SONGS duet is a kinetic and sonic installation that examines the material realities of today and the lasting effects pop media has on our collective subconscious. The exhibition remixes recordings of Cold War and Vietnam War–era protest anthems, pop songs, and Vietnamese folk songs, reimagining and distilling once-live performances on an abandoned stage set. The installation creates unlikely musical and cultural mash-ups that are at once uncanny, haunting, and clever, juxtaposing Western excess and emptiness with youthful abandon. Severin Nguyen also references psychological tactics used during the war, particularly those of Trịnh Thị Ngọ, known as Hanoi Hannah, an English-speaking Vietnamese radio personality whose broadcasts sought to evoke sympathy from American GIs and encouraged them to abandon their posts. WAR SONGS duet prompts visitors to consider not only the political character of pop music but also the proliferation of media and its global consequences more broadly.

Curated by Egbert Vongmalaithong, Assistant Curator at the ICA, the exhibition will be accompanied by a series of free public programs and events.

The 2025 Performa commission of WAR SONGS was co-commissioned by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and SUPER PROJECTS, and co-produced by the Institute for Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University. It was co-presented by BRIC, where it was curated by Job Piston, curator-at-large, and Madeleine Seidel, assistant curator, and produced by Adrienne Swan. Its presentation at the ICA is organized by Egbert Vongmalaithong.