audio distress

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

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MAYA NGUYEN

sound essay

“Audio Distress” is a performance for SOS signals, maritime audio distress calls, family youtube videos, news fragments on migration, inaudible language, wind, and feedback that navigates oceans as archives of submerged calls for help.