︎
                                                    ︎︎︎    MAIN   INFO    ︎︎︎

MAYA NGUYEN



MN is a Vietnamese-Russian interdisciplinary artist with a focus on critical sound performance and diasporic making. She gathers speech fragments, urban recordings, body movements, migratory routes, sounds imitating nature sounds, and videos of daily encounters into open-ended compositions. These often take the shape of performance lectures, sound installations, movement works, and videos.

But no single material choice defines her practice. Instead, she works through ambiguity and interaction across borders: making a commitment of not committing to just one side, but to a multiplicity of sides; to the mix of different sound channels; to the touch of different bodies. Through these material interactions, she exposes power relations inherent in human interaction and the environments that facilitate these interactions, focusing on the domestic sphere, colonial histories, migratory routes, and the relating between the human and the natural world.



︎MORE WORK
︎︎︎SOUND ESSAY: A DIASPORIC MAKING
︎INSTAGRAM
︎INFO

sound

ZOOM01_DXC_BER.MP3 (DONG XUAN MARKET)

Sound Performance; Intervention; Installation

Zentrum für Kunst und Urbanistik
Artist Residency
Berlin, Germany June-July 2023

Manzi Art Space
Hanoi, Vietnam, Aug 2023

Berlin Art Week 2025
Zentrum für Kunst und Urbanistik
Berlin, Germany Sept 2024

Winner of Karl Sczuka Research Grant from SWR Kultur in Cooperation with Goethe-Institut 2025

︎︎︎https://soundcloud.com/maya_nguyen/zoom01_dxc_bermp3-dong-xuan-center

︎︎︎https://youtu.be/ButCkezF4bI

︎https://www.zku-berlin.org/fellows/689/

︎︎︎https://www.swr.de/swrkultur/hoerspiel/karl-sczuka-preis/index.html

Sounds of bartering in accented German. A phone conversation in Vietnamese. Delivery trucks honking. Tram stopping. Kids Crying. Cashier machines beeping. Bluetooth Music. Silence.

ZOOM01_DXC_BER.MP3 is a site-specific sound project based on field recordings of urban ambience at the Dong Xuan Center in Lichtenberg, Berlin —the largest Vietnamese-run market in Germany that is based on Dong Xuan Center in Hanoi, Vietnam. Sound recordings pick up atmospheres of the various hangars of the markets, identify products and services offered, and trace snippets of conversations between storeowners, customers, and tourists. From these recordings, a performance (ZK/U, July 2023), intervention (Dong Xuan Center, Hanoi, Aug 2023) and installation (International Currents Gallery, Chicago, Nov 2023) present the soundscape of the market as a place of both economic and social exchange within the larger narratives of migratory routes and global economies.