Liberation Radio

Liberation Radio is a collaboration between UK-based artist and filmmaker Esther Johnson, Vietnam-based sound artist Nhung Nguyen, and writer and broadcaster Matthew Sweet. The work centres on the little-known story of a group of American military deserters who in 1968 went to the North Vietnamese mission in Stockholm with one object in mind – to join the army they had been drafted to fight. Instead, they were recruited for the propaganda war – using magnetic tape, pop music and political rhetoric to persuade other American servicemen to desert the war. Their recordings were transported from Sweden to Vietnam by diplomatic channels, and broadcast from transmitters on the rooftops of Hanoi, and from revolutionary bases in the countryside.

This exhibition revives that circuit of communication, fifty years after the end of the war in Vietnam, to offer a perspective of the war (the ‘American War’) that is seldom heard. With contributions from some of the surviving American deserters, Swedish anti-war activists and Vietnamese journalists of the period, the voice of Liberation Radio speaks again.

Esther Johnson
Esther Johnson (MA, Royal College of Art) is an artist and filmmaker whose work sits at the intersection of artist moving image and documentary. She creates poetic portraits that explore alternative social histories of resistance and overlooked or marginalised worlds. Her practice often repositions archival materials and oral histories to examine the complex relationship between cultural heritage, memory, and storytelling.
Her films have been screened at festivals and galleries in over 40 countries and broadcast on BBC, Channel 4, and streamed on BFI Player. A former recipient of the Philip Leverhulme Research Prize, she is currently Professor of Film and Media Arts at Sheffield Hallam University, UK.

Matthew Sweet
Matthew Sweet is co-writer, with Mark Gatiss, of the U&Alibi detective drama, Bookish. (He also novelised the series.) He presents Free Thinking on BBC Radio 4 and Sound of Cinema on BBC Radio 3. He is the author of Inventing the Victorians (Faber, 2001), Shepperton Babylon (Faber, 2005), The West End Front (Faber, 2011) and Operation Chaos (Picador 2018) and the novel The New Forest Murders (2025). His 25 years of television and radio programmes include The Culture Show (BBC2), Checking into History (C4), five series of The Philosophers Arms (Radio 4) and 1922: The Birth of Now, a ten-part history of modernism (Radio 4). He has been film critic of the Independent on Sunday, photography critic of Newsweek and fashion columnist for 1843/The Economist. In 2017 he and the baker Frances Quinn achieved a chocolate-related Guinness World record that held good until 2022, when it was broken by Ant and Dec. His biography The Great Dictator: The Life of Barbara Cartland (Hodder) will appear in 2026.

Nhung Nguyen
Nhung Nguyen is an artist and sound designer currently based in Hanoi, experimenting across a range of left-field aesthetics and expressions – ambient drone, electro acoustic, noise music, musique concrete, amongst others.
Since 2014 Nhung has been making works under the moniker Sound Awakener – and under her real name, for the more cinematic, piano-driven projects. She has worked with international labels such as Time Released Sound (US), Unknown Tones Records (US), Soft (France), Flaming Pines (UK), Fluid Audio (UK), Syrphe (Germany).
In addition to her solo work, Nhung has collaborated with artists from various other disciplines, often adding audio elements to visual experiences. Nhung’s music and sounds have appeared in exhibitions such as Hồi Sóng (2021/2024), Liberation Radio (2021), Citizen Earth (2020, Hanoi), Phan Thao Nguyen’s Poetic Amnesia (HCMC and Hanoi, 2017), the public-art initiatives Into Thin Air (2016) and Into Thin Air 2 (2018) – both in Hanoi, Richard Streimatter-Tran’s Departures (Hong Kong, 2017), amongst others. As a composer and sound designer, Nhung has also worked on music composition and sound design for theater, films and video art.