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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
︎INSTAGRAM
︎INFO

video

I JUST NEED ANOTHER MINUTE

Video Installation
600 minutes - ongoing

New Work
SAIC Galleries
Chicago, US, June 2021

︎https://youtu.be/kDNCBK0ZxbY
(4 min trailer)

What happens to our attention in the span of a minute? Of a lifetime? This project consists of one-minute, hand-held shots documenting my ongoing habit of walking to the same place at the same time of day — Lake Michigan, late afternoon. This 600 minute long video considers landscape as a set of processes in need of sustained attention, through a more patient, enduring, and minute form. Ultimately, this work aims to turn our exploitative relationship to nature into an explorative one.