Alison Nguyen ’23 Unveils First Major Live-Action Project
Visual arts alumna Alison Nguyen ’23 unveils her first major live-action project in her solo exhibition, history as hypnosis V03, at murmurs, an art space in Los Angeles. The exhibition, which runs through July 6, 2024, includes sculptures, prints, and photographs that originate from the video production process.
The centerpiece of the exhibition is a video set during the US war in Vietnam. It follows three women, recently reprogrammed by artificial intelligence, who have had all traces of their previous lives erased. As they journey through an uncanny desert landscape to a nearby metropolis, Nguyen, who also appears in the project, explores recurring themes in her work, such as the intersection of research, lived experience, and emergent technologies.
“In Nguyen’s hands, these figures without memory or history become a cinematic use case for themes of alienation, assimilation, and refusal,” Sophie Cavoulacos, Associate Curator at the MoMA, wrote. “Freely combining genre, fact, and fiction, the film draws on its Southern California locations’ postmodern glass facades, mimetic architecture, and roadside infrastructure—markers of car culture’s entanglement with American expansionism and cinema history alike—to uncover the more ineffable links between collective consciousness and the Cold War military-industrial complex.”
The exhibition also includes history as hauntology V02, a sculpture which exists independently from Nguyen’s video but embodies similar concerns. Sunken in the interior of a severed Deville are dirt collected from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory park in Los Angeles, electronic sensors, communication parts, and remnants of computers used in the US military operation Project Igloo White (1968-1973) in an attempt to automate intelligence collection in Vietnam. The materials are drawn from historical events that impacted the artist and her family, now collapsed in space rather than time.
history as hypnosis was produced with support from New York Foundation for the Arts’ Artist Fellowship in Film/Video, NYSCA’s Wave Farm MAAF Grant, MIT List Visual Arts Center, and film production company, Rug & Vase.
Alison Nguyen is a New York-based artist whose work spans video, installation, performance, and sculpture. Her practice combines the particulars of the personal with an exploration into broader forces of history, particularly those entwined with technology. Her work has been presented at the Museum of Modern Art, MIT List Center for Visual Arts, National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Korea, Vienna Secession, The Everson Museum, e-flux, The International Studio & Curatorial Program, op.cit., Signs and Symbols, KAJE, Ann Arbor Film Festival, International Film Festival Oberhausen, Channels Festival International Biennial of Video Art, True/False Film Festival, and Microscope Gallery. Nguyen received her BA in Literary Arts from Brown University. She is a 2023–2024 artist in the Whitney Independent Studies Program.