MAYA NGUYEN

MN is a Vietnamese-Russian interdisciplinary artist with a focus on sound performance and diasporic making. She gathers speech fragments, urban recordings, body movements, migratory routes, sounds imitating nature sounds, and videos of daily life into open-ended works. These often take the shape of performance lecture, sound installation, movement, and video.

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 puts power relations in action, focusing on the domestic sphere, colonial histories, movement geographies, and the relating between human and natural worlds.

photo

POSTER GIRL

Photo Installation
Colour Photographs 21x29cm

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

︎https://chicagoreader.com/arts-culture/public-and-private-politics-in-vietnamese-art-john-mooney-foundation/

︎︎︎https://artandmarket.net/reviews/2024/1/9/a-review-of-a-village-before-us

The photographs document the scratched-out face of a girl on the poster advertisement for driving school at the Dong Xuan Center in Lichtenberg, Berlin — the largest Vietnamese-run market in Germany that is based on Đồng Xuân Market in Hanoi, Vietnam. (The identity of the girl and the person who scratched her face are unknown).

These photographs are part of the project “ZOOM01_DXC_BER.MP3,” carried out during an artist residency at the Zentrüm für Kunst und Urbanistik in Berlin, Germany 2023 and at Manzi Art Space in Hanoi, Vietnam 2023.

Thanks to: Yuquan (Isaac) Duan for production assistance.