Alison Nguyen

 

Exhibition Period: 27 January 2026 - 28 March 2026

Venue: Storefront for Art and Architecture, New York

 

In the exhibition, "Perforation, Ellipse" by Alison Nguyen, we encounter a projected 16mm performance of the artist shooting an arrow across the dark city skyline. Before it lands, the arrow is suspended in a perpetual state of arrival and departure, recalling Zeno's paradox, a philosophical argument which proposes that motion is divisible into infinite stillness. The sound of the arrow hitting its off-screen target punctuates the cuts of video footage in a series of sculptures. In conversation with the formal qualities of cinema, the exhibition embraces the complications of this paradox by exploring the tensions within movement, time, and cultural memory. Nguyen orchestrates a dynamic architecture of screens, drifting between narrative passages in Nguyen's film Aisle 9, sensorial abstractions, and archival online footage of Vietnamese bolero music.

 

"Perforation, Ellipse" gestures to a homeland that is assembled in motion, a continuously moving temporality, whose trajectory reveals the forces that attempt to contain it. The presentation is the second in a series of exhibitions under the theme of "Homelands." "Homelands" is a long-term research cycle which delves into the political dimensions of memory-examining what is obscured or distorted in the dominant record-through the work of artists and architects who unmake and remake their connection to place.

 

Text courtesy of Storefront for Art and Architecture, New York

 

 

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