well-oiled machine

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.

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︎︎︎SOUND ESSAY: A DIASPORIC MAKING

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MAYA NGUYEN

sound

A performance using sound recordings of the artist giving birth in hospital, including her voice, her birthing team, and hospital machines.

What happens when a body is taken for a well-oiled machine and a train is taken for a living being? Between a human voice imitating a train and hospital recordings creating a rhythmic track, "Well-Oiled Machine" plays on rigidity, rhythm, mechanisms, and animism.