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.
The photographs zoom in on 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. 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.
Thank you to Yuquan (Isaac) Duan for production assistance.
