In May 2022, the Ren presented, IF REVOLUTION IS A SICKNESS, Diane Severin Nguyen’s first one-person museum exhibition, featuring a newly-commissioned 19-minute video of the same title and four photographs in a total installation resembling a theater and its backstage. Set in Warsaw, Poland, the film loosely follows the character of an orphaned Vietnamese child, Weronika Nguyen, who grows up to be absorbed into a South Korean pop-inspired dance group. Widely popular within a Polish youth subculture, K-pop is used by the artist as a vernacular material to trace a relationship between Eastern Europe and Asia with roots in Cold War allegiances.  

To complement the film, the artist created two necklaces with nameplates that read “Dark” and “Deprived”, referencing the necklace Weronika wears in the film that has large charms spelling Dark and the voice-over narration “Deprived? And why shouldn’t you be deprived? Those better than you were deprived.” To echo the red that permeated the installation, each necklace has a red ribbon running through the chain and comes in a custom red velvet box, imprinted with the name of the film and the artist’s initials. 

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