Perforation, Ellipse by Alison Nguyen

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 her film Aisle 9, sensorial abstractions, and archival online footage of Vietnamese bolero music. 

Set in a speculative future, Aisle 9 follows a group of workers who hang out after hours in a hosiery warehouse. They shoot archery, play cards, and trade conspiracy theories as their workplace lurches towards foreclosure. An errant arrow leads them to a sequestered storage area overflowing with mysterious boxes marked with the logo of an unknown tech company. Inside the boxes they discover a trove of government-banned media prompting them to turn Aisle 9 into an adhoc viewing room.

Across the installation, melodies of once forbidden bolero music, also known as nhạc vàng (“yellow music”), periodically surge across the multiple channels of video, aligning disparate images on the sculpture’s monitors, into a shared emotional frequency. Following the American War in Vietnam, the Vietnamese government banned bolero music for its sentimentality and romantic lyricism, however, the genre has recently reentered mainstream circulation. It endured underground in Vietnam because it was condemned, forced to exist quietly in households; and in the United States and abroad, disseminated through diasporic tapes, and transnational cabarets such as the television show Paris by Night. In the U.S. today, different but parallel constraints are performed, shaping what may be seen, shown, or archived. Nguyen stages censorship as a paradoxical system that can reproduce the very meanings it seeks to suppress, opposing a binary of freedom and repression. Cutting between partial stories and obscured gestures, Nguyen asserts that images withhold just as much as they disclose, reminding us that cultural memory is always negotiated under uneven conditions. Viewers must read between the lines to discern the encoded politics, and attune themselves to the residues that censorship inevitably leaves behind.

Wall works made with gold leaf and metal evoke a linguistic slippage: vàng means gold as well as “yellow,” which was the color used to disparage bolero as decadent or counterrevolutionary. Nguyen uses gold as a conceptual hinge to mark the transmutation of cultural forms under pressure, and an index of political contradiction. When bolero swells in unison across the installation with a momentary sense of continuity, a fleeting homeland is built through affect, time, and space, rather than territory. By staging cultural memory as an unstable montage, the exhibition questions how narratives of belonging are constructed, mythologized, and controlled. Instead of offering a single story, Nguyen proposes a constellation of moving images whose connections remain open-ended, and move according to the pulse of time drifting, interrupted, and traversing future, past, and present. The works ask questions about what it means to inherit memories shaped by prohibition and displacement, and what kinds of consciousnesses emerge from such conditions. 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.

Alison Nguyen is a visual artist and filmmaker working across video, installation, and sculpture. Through approaches of speculative fiction, research, and embodied performance, she combines the particulars of personal experience with broader inquiries into forces of history. Moving image is the nucleus of Nguyen’s expansive practice; she sees video as a way of proposing different ways of existing within time and narrative. Nguyen’s 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; KAJE; Murmurs LA; Art Basel Hong Kong Encounters; Frieze Seoul Film; Ann Arbor Film Festival; International Film Festival Oberhausen; CPH:DOX; and Channels Festival International Biennial of Video Art, among others. Alison Nguyen received her M.F.A. in Visual Art from Columbia University and her B.A. in Literary Arts from Brown University. She was a 2023–2024 Studio Fellow at the Whitney Independent Study Program.

Perforation, Ellipse 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.

Homelands is made possible with support from the Mellon Foundation, Teiger Foundation, the Brendan & Helen Bechtel Foundation, the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, and the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation; public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature; the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council; and the invaluable generosity of Storefront’s Board of Directors, the Storefront Circle, Storefront members, and individual donors.