Maya Nguyen

I am a Vietnamese-Russian interdisciplinary artist with a focus on critical sound performance and diasporic making. I gather speech fragments, urban recordings, body movements, migratory routes, sounds imitating nature sounds, and videos of daily  encounters into open-ended works. But no single material choice defines my practice. Instead, I work 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, I expose 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.

“Running Out Of Hand” is a series of fiber works based on the photographic archive from the Vietnam War with America (1955-75). Images of refugee families are condensed down to the physical gesture of bodies gripping one another in flight.