Diane Severin Nguyen’s New Film Explores Surveillance and Solitude

Diane Severin Nguyen’s films move with uncommon grace through the architecture of contemporary image making, drawing on the visual languages of pop music, cinema and internet culture to unmask how personal histories become entangled with wider political narratives. Her work has long centred on teenage girls, those figures whose identities slip between performance and representation, between the authentic and the constructed.

Her new film, Powerless, made for Haus der Kunst, deepens this inquiry. Shot through surveillance cameras, drones and bodycams, it follows a young girl living alone in Germany’s Black Forest, a landscape rendered otherworldly by the technological apparatus that observes her. The work considers the delicate distinction between being watched and being cared for, between the apparatus of supervision and the structures of protection. Questions of innocence and victimhood shimmer through the frame, complicated by the very tools meant to capture them.

Nguyen’s films are underpinned by the role technology has played in transforming not only how violence is waged, but how it is captured and circulated through the machinery of contemporary media. Her visual language refuses simplicity. Instead, she layers surveillance footage with the grammar of music videos and social media, creating a syntax that feels both immediate and archival, both intimate and exposed.

In a forthcoming profile by Laura McLean Ferris for Frieze, Nguyen discusses the making of Powerless, the ethical questions that haunt its creation, and how the film sits within her broader examination of how teenage femininity is mediated, performed and ultimately consumed by the digital systems that surround it.

Imagery courtesy of Frieze (@friezeofficial).