Diane Severin Nguyen

by Sohrab Mohebbi

(featured in OSMOS Magazine Issue 20)

When we look at a photo by Diane Severin Nguyen we first register the work as abstract. The pictures are indeed hard to connect to specific things that we can recognize and identify. Further scrutiny leaves you with bits and pieces of objects or phenomena—candies, a glove, a plastic bag, coins, an orange—but also natural phenomena such as fire, water, decay, and smoke. What we see in each photograph is, on the one hand, a self-referential and idiosyncratic interiority, but, on the other, an invocation of universal feelings: pain, pleasure, aversion, discomfort, desire—and usually a combination thereof. The photos are of the arrangements and situations the artist creates in the studio and, as such, they can be considered documents of a process or still lifes. A photograph makes life still, it captures a moment, even if it later manipulates, contextualizes, and frames that moment; the photograph always pictures an absence, a death. As such, there is violence embedded in every photograph. Nguyen has closely studied the discourse and conventions of photojournalism and applies them in her studio practice—for example, how she does not use studio lights and follows the process of the material and their interactions. What could say, Nguyen is swapping “event” a la photojournalism, with process. The latter being mainly associated with artistic practice while the former is rooted in the photographic discourse and its relationship with truth.

What was once known as the photograph no longer exists (if it ever did). Instead, what we have is the photographic, which acknowledges the constructed nature of the photograph’s claims.What you see in an image is not what the image shows. Yet photography discourse is, for the most part, built upon the photograph’s truth claim and not its fables, the photograph not the photographic. The latter being the discursive apparatus that envelopes the photographic image. A different theory of photography would depart from the photographic and find the truth claim an exception. The photograph’s said truth claim is validated through a discursive process that includes agents with various investments in the validity or invalidity of the claims. The validity of the photographic event is therefore contingent on the persuasive power of the producers, distributors, and interpreters of the resultant image. The event itself becomes a process, one begun at the moment a picture is made and never completed. In this scenario, the photograph’s supposedly indexicality is relational; it relies on an interpretive assembly that acknowledge sits relationship to a particular event/object but proceeds in many directions, from Barthes to an online vintage-sneaker shop’s descriptions.

Rather than rely upon the semiotics of indexicality, Nguyen prefers Minor White’s notion of equivalency and the photograph’s ability to “evoke feelings about things and situations and events which for some reason or other are not or cannot be photographed” and “use the forms and shapes of objects in front of the camera for their expressive-evocative qualities.” (White, n.d.) (1)

For example, Nguyen creates napalm in her studio, fires the found and sourced material, and captures the event with a camera. There is a torched red remote control and by silver fire-resistant gloves. There is an orange bleeding, there is a plastic bag knotted around a hose.Many of these images look like debris, the remnants, the aftermaths of a human apocalypse. These are images of material interactions, processes of devastation. You can enact these material and chemical reactions in the studio and photograph them.You can document how they are used in wars and publish them in print and digital magazines. Nguyen’s images show that a process could invoke effects similar to an event and that both can be captured with a camera and presented as photographs.They are equally processed and rendered through lens consciousness, yet they are distinguished by violence of the operations that produce them.

1) Minor White, “Equivalence: The Perennial Trend" PSA Journal, vol 29, no. 7, 1963, p.17-21

Sohrab Mohebbi is director of SculptureCenter, New York, where he previously held the positions of curator and curator-at-large (2018–21). At the museum, he organized solo shows with Banu Cennetoğlu, Fiona Connor, Rafael Domenech, Rindon Johnson, Diane Severin Nguyen, and Christian Nyampeta; the first survey exhibition of Tishan Hsu; and the group show Searching the Sky for Rain (2019). Mohebbi served as the Kathe and Jim Patrinos Curator of the 58th Carnegie International. He was formerly Associate Curator at REDCAT, Los Angeles, where he organized solo exhibitions in addition to It is obvious from the map (2017; co-curated by Thomas Keenan) and Hotel Theory (2015). Mohebbi received a BFA in Photography from Tehran Art University and an MA from the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, Annandale-On-Hudson, New York.

Diane Severin Nguyen works with photography, video and installation. Through material and sculptural experimentations, Nguyen approaches the photographic moment as one of transformation. The artist is particularly interested in exceeding photography as a mode of documentation, and engages with it rather as a set of conditions shaped by desire and speculation. Her video work narrativizes these tensions by examining the histories of power, victimhood and forms of propaganda that underpin cultural (and self) image-making. She has exhibited her work internationally, in places like SculptureCenter, The Renaissance Society, Rockbund Art Museum, MoMA PS1, the Carnegie Museum of Art, the Schinkel Pavilion, Jeu du Paume, the Hammer Museum, and many others. Her films have been screened at film festivals such as the New York Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam and Berlinale. Nguyen is a recent recipient of the 2023 Guggenheim fellowship and lives and works in New York. Her work is included in the 2024 Whitney Biennial.