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 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 interaction and the environments that facilitate them, focusing on the domestic sphere, colonial histories, migratory routes, and the relating between the human and the natural world.
MN105.F64 K65 2020 This project brings together influential voices from history that have been inherited solely, or largely, through tape recordings. Decades after the actual event of speech, these voices are received by us eternally etched with the hiss of tape and the static of transmission. In these particular recordings, voices that have left tangible marks on history are themselves marked by the passing of time.
James Baldwin (4’38”)
When asked by Mavis Nicholson to speak on homosexual love in 1987, writer James Baldwin shifts from the question of loving this or that person, to the question of loving anyone at all. For Baldwin, loving as such creates the intimate ties that are necessary for a functioning society. Through the undulating interplay of layers of feedback, the cadence of Baldwin’s speech is transformed into a texture at once confidential and communal.
Hannah Arendt (6’03”)
In an interview with Günter Gaus in 1964, philosopher Hannah Arendt is asked to define political belonging with respect to love. In her view, love, which is personal and contingent, is separate from political belonging and organization. Her response is layered on itself with varying levels of feedback that oscillate between a single speaker and a crowd. As her voice builds on itself, different layers clash, collide, collude, and come together in ever shifting constellations.
Side A: The Language of the Unheard; tape as distortion. Ho Chi Minh, Assata Shakur, Simone de Beauvoir, Martin Luther King.
Side B: The Anguish over the Herd; tape as transmission. James Baldwin, Hannah Arendt.
