Diane Severin Nguyen Whitney Biennial 2024 Whitney Museum of American Art, New York 20 March — 11 August 2024

“Diane Severin Nguyen, an incisive young photographer and video artist, whose 67-minute film In Her Time (Iris’s Version) proposes a vibrant case study of digital-political bafflement and the hazards of projecting the present onto the past. Shot on a gigantic Chinese backlot usually used for nationalist epics, this profound, sometimes darkly comic work centers on a young actress struggling with her role in a (fictional) movie about the Nanjing Massacre, one of the worst atrocities of the 20th century; Nguyen also intercuts behind-the-scenes phone footage of the actress-playing-the-actress, until history, cinema, propaganda and selfie opportunities are just a hall of mirrors. She understands that to work through past crimes and present inequities takes much more than sloganeering, and that our speculative visions of resistance and renewal might serve the dominant order quite fine.” — Jason Farago, The New York Times

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