ARTIST STATEMENT
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. “Oh Prairie, How I Long To Hold You” is an installation that seeks to re-engage a physical connection to nature, which can be as simple as running one’s hand through grass. As human agriculture takes over the land, only one percent of tall grass prairie remains in the US today. “Sea Shell” is a video that asks: How do we process connection in a time of technological presence and physical absence? It was born out of the pandemic lockdown.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Maya Nguyen holds a B.A. in Philosophy and Comparative Literature from University of Chicago and an M.F.A in Sound from School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She has shown with Vincom Center for Contemporary Art (Hanoi), Zentrum für Kunst und Urbanistik (Berlin), UCLA New Wight Gallery (Los Angeles), Manzi Art Space (Hanoi), World Forum For Acoustic Ecology 2023 (Florida), Internationales Digitalkunst Festival 2022 (Stuttgart), Terrain Biennial 2021 (Chicago), Watershed Art & Ecology (Chicago), Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics (Colorado), Northwestern University (Evanston) and elsewhere. She is currently based in Chicago.
© Maya Nguyen