Maya Nguyen: I Hear You Can Make A Helicopter Sound With A Flower

At the intersection of foley practice, cinema sound, and meme aesthetics, this performance lecture explores the sonic structure of trauma, Hollywood portrayals of the Vietnam War, and cultural soft power through sound. This work takes as its starting point the iconic helicopter scene from Francis Ford Coppola’s film Apocalypse Now, in which a full-scale U.S. air assault is executed on a Vietnamese village with Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries (Walkürenritt) playing on loudspeakers. It asks: In a rapidly evolving media environment, how do we depict, listen, and respond to the pain of others?

The performance will last approximately forty minutes, and light refreshments will be served.

Please register in advance and bring a state- or federally-issued photo ID for check-in in the 150 N. Michigan building lobby.

ABOUT THE EXHIBITION

Moving between languages, time zones, and visual cultures that connect Vietnam, Germany, and the United States, Nguyen considers translation as a form of arrival. Titled after the German word 'Quereinsteiger,' which refers to someone with nontraditional training who transfers into a new professional field, LATERAL ENTRANT is installed throughout the Goethe-Institut Chicago's space and responds to its environment in an office building. Incorporating video, photography, and performance, this exhibition uses coincidence, misinterpretation, and analogy as tools for investigating both individual biographies and broader experiences of migration.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Maya Nguyen is an interdisciplinary artist with a focus on sound and diasporic making. Marked by migration from Hanoi, to Moscow, and now Chicago, her practice develops formal strategies to articulate experiences of lived ambiguity. Nguyen incorporates disparate (and often clashing) material sources into forms that remain conceptually indeterminate, such as performance-lectures, sound improvisation, and collaborative sculptures. Some favored materials include: speech fragments, mistranslations, body glitches, migratory routes, urban recordings, sounds imitating nature sounds, internet debris, baby babble, breast pump parts, and videos of daily life, among others. Her works are presented internationally, moving fluidly between galleries, sound venues, pop-up shows and universities, with recent shows at Watershed Art & Ecology (Chicago), Jack Straw New Media Gallery (Seattle), Zentrum für Kunst und Urbanistik (Berlin), Saari Residency (Mynämäki, FI), Manzi Art Space (Hanoi), and recognition as Arts Club of Chicago Fellow 2025-26 and Karl Sczuka Radio Art Research Prize 2024 (SWR/Goethe Institute). Nguyen holds a BA in Philosophy/Comparative Literature from The University of Chicago and MFA in Sound from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

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Host or Publisher Goethe-Institut Chicago