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. Embracing the complications of this paradox, the exhibition explores the tensions within movement, time, and cultural memoryNguyen 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. 

Incorporating melodies of once forbidden bolero music, also known as nhạc vàng (“yellow music”), 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.

Asking 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.