We are pleased to announce the solo exhibition of Alison Nguyen ‘history as hypnosis V03’ on view from May 30th to July 6th, 2024. This exhibition brings together Nguyen’s three-channel video ‘history as hypnosis’ as well as sculpture, prints and photographs that constellate from the process surrounding the video.
About the film ‘history as hypnosis’: “A speculative road film that unfolds through cultural memory of the US war in Vietnam, the work follows three women, recently reprogrammed by an artificial intelligence that has wiped all traces of their previous lives, as they journey through an uncanny desert landscape to a nearby metropolis. In Nguyen’s hands, these figures without memory or history become a cinematic use case for themes of alienation, assimilation, and refusal. Freely combining genre, fact, and fiction, the film draws on its Southern California locations’ postmodern glass facades, mimetic architecture, and roadside infrastructure—markers of car culture’s entanglement with American expansionism and cinema history alike—to uncover the more ineffable links between collective consciousness and the Cold War military-industrial complex. Nguyen’s liveaction project (in which she also appears) underlines recurring themes in her work, which spans film, new media, installation, sculpture, printmaking, and writing.”
- Sophie Cavoulacos, Associate Curator. Dept of Film, MoMA
history as hauntology V02: a sculpture which exists independently from Nguyen’s video yet embodying similar concerns and furthering the work’s autobiographical basis. Sunken in the interior of the severed Deville: Dirt collected from NASA’s jet propulsion laboratory park in Los Angeles and electronic sensors, communications parts, and remnant of computers used in the U.S.’s military operation Project Igloo White (1968 - 1973) in an attempt to automate intelligence collection in Vietnam. The materials are drawn from historical events which impacted the artist and her family, now collapsed in space rather than time