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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.



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sound essay

I LOST MY MOTHER’S VOICE AND WOKE UP SCREAMING


Performance of live and archival voices (20min)

EXP / VOX
Tritriangle Gallery
Chicago,US April 2024

︎︎︎https://youtu.be/TelLSRZ4BmE

︎︎︎https://sixtyinchesfromcenter.org/a-sonic-geography-of-voice-a-review-of-exp-vox/


How does motherhood physically alter the voice? And how does genocide alter motherhood?

This work utilizes the affective registers of the voice that are central to our perception and memory of our mothers’ voices — humming, breathing, crying, whispering. And then this voice is pushed to its limit through improvisational sampling of recorded interviews of mothers performing acts of care, that is, continuing the mundane, in extreme circumstances.  You hear a constellation of seemingly random words such as “big car,” “whoosh,” “fireworks” and “thunder.” Until you realize that these words are the various ways that mothers in Gaza describe the sounds of bombs to their children.

Their sampled voices are improvisationally woven together in such a way that it becomes impossible to disambiguate between protector and victim, someone in control and someone helpless. Here, the mother’s voice is both whispering and screaming.