Whitney Biennial 2024: Even Better Than the Real Thing

Floor 6

Born 1990 in Carson, CA
Lives in New York, NY

In Her Time (Iris’s Version) follows an actress named Iris as she rehearses for a leading role in a historical war film about the Nanjing Massacre of 1937, a brutal assault on Chinese civilians by the Imperial Japanese army during the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937– 45). Through this framework, Diane Severin Nguyen explores the ways that history circulates in the present—largely through popular media, partly as memory, and partly as re-creation or even fan fiction. The doubling back and collapsing of time is furthered by “Iris’s Version,” which includes the actress’s retrospective commentary about the making of In Her Time alongside her own private iPhone footage.

Nguyen shot much of the film at Hengdian World Studios, one of the largest film studios in the world that has also become a destination for filmmakers and tourists alike to experience a sweeping nationalist history of China. Nguyen features some of the thousands of migrant workers who come to Hengdian each year with hopes of screentime and end up as background actors portraying Japanese soldiers or civilian casualties. Over the course of Nguyen’s film, fiction and reality fuse as she explores the limits of the ways history is told and uses re-enactment as a vehicle for visualizing the future.