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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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sound

I HEAR YOU CAN MAKE A HELICOPTER SOUND WITH A FLOWER


Performance with helicopter foley, domestic instruments, ideological speeches, memes, and curated sound effects (30min)

A Village Before Us
John David Mooney Foundation
Chicago, US Nov 2023

Cleveland Uncommon Sound Project
Convivium 33 Gallery
Cleveland, US May 2024

︎︎︎ https://youtu.be/KcM8YnedUXQ

I hear you can make a helicopter sound with a flower.
I hear you can make green balls sound like bombs.
I hear you can make nature sound fake.
I hear you can make words sound meaningful.
I hear you can make meaning sound atmospheric.
I hear you can make sound sound again.

At the intersection of foley, ideological sound design, cinema sound, and meme aesthetics, this performative sound essay explores the sonic structure of trauma, Hollywood portrayals of the Vietnam War, and empathy through sound. It asks: in a continuously evolving media environment, how do we depict, listen, and respond to the pain of others?