Alison Nguyen's Perforation, Ellipse at Storefront for Art and Architecture reviewed in "On Paranoid Time" by Qingyuan Deng, published on e-flux.
Film Notes publishes Qingyuan Deng’s essay that brings Lacan’s account of retroactive meaning into relation with Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s distinction between paranoid and reparative reading, asking how recent artists’ films and moving-image installations hold the time between an event and its belated political comprehension.
Excerpt from article --
In Perforation, Ellipse, installed earlier this year at New York’s Storefront for Art and Architecture, 16mm projections showed the artist Alison Nguyen shooting an arrow across the dark downtown skyline. The arrow crossed the width of the triangular gallery but never landed, forever remaining in transit. The offscreen sound of an impact punctuated the cuts across the installation’s multiple video channels.
Bolero (or nhạc vàng, or yellow music) is the exhibition’s political center. Following the American War, the Vietnamese communist government banned the genre for its bourgeois sentimentality and romantic lyricism. It survived underground despite and because of its suppression, circulating through makeshift cassettes and Parisian television. Periodically, text reading “WE ONLY HAVE ONE SUMMER” or “THE CURRENT SWIRLS AROUND HER LIFE OF HOPES UNMET” surged across all channels simultaneously, flushing the screens with warm orange. A fleeting homeland is built through affect in motion rather than territory. The channels briefly shared one frequency before drifting apart again.
The cinematic cut of Aisle 9 unfolds the speculative world more fully. The workers are, first and foremost, conspirators. Silvia Federici’s 1985 poem “In Praise of Conspiracy Theory” (which is cited in and interlaced into the film) opens with an etymological explanation that the linguistic history of conspiring originates in breathing together. Federici reclaims conspiring from the neoliberal discourse that dismisses structural analysis as paranoid fantasy and treats economic violence as impersonal. Federici insists: “for as long as there are men who sit and plan deeds that cause any of us to die, no conceptual flight or verbal trick will stop me from concluding they are conspiring against us.” The refusal to accept that coordinated violence is accidental is a form of political intelligence native to the powerless and the dispossessed. To conspire is to breathe together; the conspiracy theory is the knowledge of those who share the same poisoned air. In Aisle 9, the workers breathe together.
Text courtesy of e-flux.
Images: Alison Nguyen, Perforation, Ellipse, Storefront for Art and Architecture, 2026 (installation view). Photographed by Dario Lasagni.
Learn more --
https://www.e-flux.com/notes/6783493/on-paranoid-time
