︎︎︎ MAIN INFO ︎︎︎

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

SOUND ESSAY: A DIASPORIC MAKING

︎︎︎Performance Documentation Archive︎︎︎

Research Sources (in alphabetical order)

Светлана Алексиевич_Последние Свидетели
Nora Alter + Timothy Corrigan_Essays on the Essay Film
Lawrence Abu Hamdan_Live Audio Essays
Claire Bishop_Disordered Attention: How We Look At Art And Performance Today
Camille Casemier + Selena Kearney_The Right to Look / The Right to Have
Dipesh Chakrabarty_The Climate of History in a Planetary Age
Jace Clayton_Uproot: Travels in 21st-Century Music and Digital Culture + DJ Rupture Mixtapes
Cecilia Cornejo_I Wonder What You Will Remember Of September
Mati Diop_Dahomey / In My Room
Daniel Eisenberg_Cooperation of Parts
Frantz Fanon_A Dying Colonialism
Harun Farocki_Inextinguishable Fire
Glissando_Audiopapers
Saidiya Hartman_Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route
Hồ Chí Minh_Tuyên Ngôn Độc Lập
Mazen Kerbaj_Starry Night
Seth Kim-Cohen_In The Blink Of An Ear: Toward A Non-Cochlear Sonic Art
Florian Klinger_Aesthetic Action

Clarice Lispector_Água Viva

Nour Mobarak_Father Fugue

Tracie Morris_It All Started

Tammy Nguyen_O

Emeka Ogboh_The Song of the Germans (Deutschlandlied)

Peixuan Ouyang_The____World

Katja Petrowskaja_Vielleicht Esther

Alexandra Pirici_Encyclopedia of Relations

Edward Said_Orientalism

Mitsu Salmon_Desert Turtle

Adania Shibli_Minor Detail

Hito Steyerl_Too Much World: Is the Internet Dead?

Kidlat Tahimik_Perfumed Nightmare
Rea Tajiri_History and Memory

Trịnh Thị Minh-Hà_Surname Viet Given Name Nam

Danh Võ_Oma Totem
Vanessa Vu_Meine Schrottcontainerkindheit

Samson Young_Nocturne
Katarina Zdjelar_Shoum

Performance Log

2024 You Suck, The Capsule, Chicago US
2024 Sounds Like Music To My Ears, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, US
2024 When You Suck My Breast Is My Favourite Sound, Roots & Culture, Chicago US
2024 Audio Distress, The Capsule, Chicago US
2024 I Hear You Can Make A Helicopter Sound With A Flower, Convivium Gallery, Cleveland US
2024 The Sea Like The Desert Doesn’t Quench The Thirst / Planet Blah, Watershed Art & Ecology, Chicago US
2024 The Cavity Was As Hollow As It Was Deep , Stasias Gallery, Chicago US
2024 What Is The Difference Between The Living And The Dead, Compound Yellow, Chicago US
2024 I Lost My Mother’s Voice And Woke Up Screaming, Tritriangle, Chicago US
2024 Sounds Like Music To My Ears, Comfort Station, Chicago US

2023 The Sea Like The Desert Doesn’t Quench The Thirst, Murmuration, Chicago US
2023 I Hear You Can Make A Helicopter Sound With A Flower, John David Mooney Foundation, Chicago US

2022 Artist Talk, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, US