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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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video

PARADISE ON GOOGLE EARTH


Split-screen Video, Stereo Sound, 07:10min

Earth Day Art Model Festival
Indiana University, April 2021

the moon seems closer 
mn gallery + studio 
Chicago, US September 2022

︎︎︎https://youtu.be/qcDiO-9O35Y

Is there paradise on earth? If so, how many? A Google Earth walk through the cities of Valparaíso, Chile and Valparaiso, Indiana, USA, are displayed side-by-side, along with sound recordings from the two cities. The sound and image of Valparaíso, Chile is represented by the left audio-visual channel, while the sound and image of Valparaiso, Indiana is represented by the right. The two walks follow one set of directions: a turn left in one city, corresponds to a turn left in the other city.

As a bustling urban city of the Global South collides with a residential suburb of the Global North, two contrasting worlds merge into a single, dreamlike landscape. Tropical palm trees pop up next to autumn maple trees, winding streets intersect with wide driveways, and bright city murals meet private white mansions. As the cursor navigates its way through two Valparaiso cities, it also navigates through their geopolitical, cultural, and social landscapes. How does one paradise compare with the other? Does one paradise change our view of the other?


Image from Google Earth Maps
Sound from https://aporee.org/maps/