With “Foibles of a Reconstruction”, NON Berlin presents Trong Gia Nguyen’s first solo exhibition in Berlin.

The Vietnamese-American artist assembles a series of site-specific installations and works that consider the fragmentation of a larger collective psyche, associating it with notions of structural decline and the breakdown of communication.
At a deeper root, the works examine where power is gain and lost. Whether starting from populist nativism or poetic verse, what cannot be understood leads to alienation and fear, and even a disconnection with empathy and humanity, ultimately resulting in the extremities of cultural polarization and brute violence.

The central components of the exhibition are two site-specific architectural installations that directly consider the debate around current Covid travel passports for vaccinated travellers. Utilizing the two electronic codes – one a QR code and the other a UPC or bar code – issued to him for his two Pfizer vaccination appointments, Nguyen transforms the digital stamps into structures that evoke the universality of that language, and also the opaque nature of their unreadability to the human mind.

Trong Gia Nguyen_In Case Of Genius Destabilizing, 2018┬®Trong Gia Nguyen

Other works in the exhibition similarly navigate the viewer towards a moment of self-reflection against silver and black mirrors, contending with everything from gun violence and political corruption, to digital data, internalized racism, and the frailty of language.