La mirada mental
Monika Nguyen

Monika Nguyen’s works emphasize her socio-cultural concerns, focusing on extreme and exceptional social situations, setting her work in architectural environments, which acts as stages of her narratives.

When Monika arrived to Argentina she was interested on the current increase of theft and violence against private houses in the city. Her idea was to make photographs of a staged burglary scene at a residential house in Buenos Aires. Like a comic strip, the single photos would narrate the burglaries break into a residential house. However, her first proposal  developed in a much more sophisticated analysis: how the people are suggested about the insecurity and some times (influenced by the news, media and collective psychosis) imagine situations that does not exist at all.

Her works are exhibited at ‘ ace in a digital format. In that way, her photographs are projected in a video, for which the sequence of the story is narrated in a linear manner. She is showing two series of photos shoot in Buenos Aires recently. In the first series a couple of dolls are the supposed victims of their own space. The hidden person, in the second series, is trying to remain unseen from the house owner. Monika’s background as a stage designer for theater, film and photography is present in these series where the protagonist is threatened and stalked in a cold and theatrical architectural scenery.  Through the anxiety of the intrusion of a (unknown) person into an individual space the artist also suggests that it might also be just an appearance in “the mind’s eye”