Alison Nguyen's Perforation, Ellipse at Storefront for Art and Architecture featured in Hyperallergic, reviewed by Lisa Yin Zhang.
Plaintive and yearning bolero music emanates from multiple screens pinned to wheeled metal armatures. It’s played by a middle-aged woman with a mic and about a million filters, and a fuckboy in a tuxedo trying to make what appears to be a thirst trap, and starts and stops abruptly, spliced with clips of flickering abstract shapes or the words “SCENE MISSING.” The musical genre was suppressed by the Vietnamese government in the wake of what they call the American war, but it was nurtured underground and abroad. The unpredictable, funny, and devastating ways that history alchemizes with the present seems to be the central thread of this exhibition. “Interest goes up? We starve in Nigeria,” one screen reads. Fitting, then, that the central video depicts the artist firing arrows from a crossbow with Manhattan’s City Hall in the background. What’s a couple of measly arrows against the levers of the state? It’s not nothing. What arrows are trailing through time as we speak? —Lisa Yin Zhang
Text courtesy of Hyperallergic.
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Alison Nguyen: Perforation, Ellipse | Hyperallergic
