Goethe-Institut Chicago

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Join us for an artist talk by Maya Nguyen, whose exhibition LATERAL ENTRANT is currently on view at the Goethe-Institut Chicago.
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 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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Director Dieu Hao Do travels to Vietnam, Hong Kong, California, and Germany to reconnect with his estranged family.
Join us for an evening of film and discussion for the closing of LATERAL ENTRANT, the exhibition currently on view at the Goethe-Institut Chicago that connects Germany, Vietnam, and the United States. Documentary film HAO ARE YOU will be introduced by Zach Ramon Fitzpatrick (University of Wisconsin Madison), who will also discuss the histories of Vietnamese-German communities in West Germany and the GDR.

HAO ARE YOU
Dir. Dieu Hao Do
Germany, 2023, 93 min.
German, Cantonese, and Vietnamese with English subtitles

After the fall of Saigon on 30 April 1975 to North Vietnamese troops, more than 1.5 million people fled the communist regime. Many of them, including director Dieu Hao Do’s family, belonged to the Chinese minority there. In HAO ARE YOU, Dieu Hao Do explores the fragmentation of his family after the US-led war in Vietnam scattered them across three continents. Nearly fifty years after their escape, contact between the seven family members has all but broken down. How have traumas from persecution and violence inscribed themselves on the bodies and souls of the survivors and their children?

ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Zach Ramon Fitzpatrick is Assistant Professor of German and affiliate of the Asian American Studies program at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. His research and teaching interests encompass Asian German studies, as well as film and media. In 2025, he released the co-edited volume Charting Asian German Film History. Zach also runs the Instagram account @AsianGermanUpdates, where he posts about media, history, people, and community events, with the goal of empowering and lending visibility to the Asian German diaspora.

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.
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Join us for the last in our Rosa von Praunheim retrospective series for a screening of his documentary TRANSEXUAL MENACE, which will be introduced by Northwestern University's TJ Billard.

This film takes its title from the name of "the most exciting political action group in the USA"—transgendered people who are defining themselves, demanding their legal rights, and fighting for medical care and against job discrimination. Considered by von Praunheim to be the “most fascinating [project] in my long life as a filmmaker,” TRANSEXUAL MENACE is a sensitive and carefully crafted portrait that deals with issues openly and honestly. “I was able to earn the trust of many who are often reluctant to be interviewed. Courageous people talked to me, who transitioned in such problematic professions as law enforcement and firefighting.” This film gives viewers remarkable insight into the home and work lives of transsexuals from many cultures and countries, including female-to-male transsexuals and those with families and children.

SPEAKER BIO
TJ Billard is an Associate Professor in the School of Communication and, by courtesy, the Department of Sociology at Northwestern University. Outside of Northwestern, they are the founder and Executive Director of the Center for Applied Transgender Studies in Chicago and Editor-in-Chief of the Center's flagship journal, the Bulletin of Applied Transgender Studies. Dr. Billard is the author of Voices for Transgender Equality: Making Change in the Networked Public Sphere (Oxford University Press, 2024) and co-editor (with Marquis Bey) of The Oxford Handbook of Transgender Studies (Oxford University Press, forthcoming).

Light refreshments will be served. This event is free and open to the public, but please register in advance and bring a state- or federally-issued photo ID for check-in in our lobby.