Rebels in our hearts

The film IF REVOLUTION IS A SICKNESS was shot in Warsaw in 2020, the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. Nguyen gathered a group of teenagers who performed choreographed routines against the backdrop of buildings from the era of the Polish People’s Republic. The music written for the film draws from K-pop aesthetics, and the narrative revolves around the story of an orphaned girl of Vietnamese descent who becomes part of a new community.

Diane Severin Nguyen reunites with Jakub Grzybała, a dancer from IF REVOLUTION IS A SICKNESS (2021), for a new live performance alongside her installation at MSN Warsaw. Grzybała’s choreography responds to Nguyen’s reinterpretation of K-pop songs, highlighting how music and pop-culture media shift meaning across contexts—between self-actualization and commodification, personal expression and ideological force. As sound and movement unfold, the performance reveals how a single entity can be shaped toward opposing ends.

Diane Severin Nguyen (born 1990 in Carson, California; currently living in New York) is an American visual artist who works with film and photography. Her works are created through the analysis of social media and philosophical texts, as well as through the observation of urban waste and remnants. The artist is interested in blurring the boundaries between high and popular culture, the natural and the artificial, as well as the mechanisms of image construction in relation to historical forms of visual propaganda.

Dancers: Jakub Grzybała, Julia Wancerz, Kamila Khuat Cao, Oliwia Słoń, Marcin Kowalczyk, Roksana Rudzińska
Music production: Samuel Wilken 
Producer/studio manager (New York): Khanh Le Le