Body Language
-
Sorawit Songsataya
b.1986
Title
Body Language
Details
| Production Date | 2024 |
|---|---|
| Collection(s) | Govett-Brewster Art Gallery collection, gift of the artist |
| Accession Number | 2024/7 |
| Media | acrylic, sedge mats, handmade paper, digital print |
| Measurements | variable |
About
Body Language belongs to a broader body of investigation considering sound and its relation to duration and memory. Treating sound as a dynamic, living force, Songsataya’s works trouble the routes by which ephemeral vibrations and utterances find themselves translated into visual form.
The work’s form references the tradition of graphic musical notation. Here, sedge mats gesture to staves upon which handmade paper spheres embedded with plant matter build towards a score. Upon this paper is a printed image of a digitally-rendered sound visualisation. This sound visualisation translates a digitised wax cylinder recording of the Siam Theatre Ensemble performing the song Kham Hom (Sweet Words) in Berlin in September 1900, subjecting this trace of a historic performance through layers of abstraction and translation.
The work enfolds material redolent of the artist’s personal and familial histories, and the changing conditions of the places they have inhabited. Seeds, lentils and plant matter emdedded in the paper was gathered by and gifted to the artist during a period spent living in Taranaki, while the sedge mats were woven by women from their grandmother’s home town of Chanthaburi.
Body Language seeks to unsettle conventional Western musical structures—which regulate the representation of sonic experience into a rigid code of musical symbols arranged across a two-dimensional surface. Instead, they open the possibility of thinking of sound as something deeply embodied, and not necessarily reproducible—as an expansive, living process that enfolds sensation, matter and personal histories.
This was work commissioned in 2024 as part of the exhibition Fibrous Soul, which included works by Songsataya and Maata Wharehoka (Ngāti Tahinga, Ngāti Koata, Ngāti Apakura, Ngāti Toa, Ngāti Kuia). Attentive to locally specific forms of knowledge, to forms of knowledge and cultural practice embedded in Thailand—the place of Sondsataya’s birth—and to the ethics, responsibilities and questions stemming from their position as a tauiwi artist working upon Māori land, Songsataya’s works within Fibrous Soul sought to make porous boundaries between states of being— proximity and distance, vibrancy and inertia, life and non-life.
— Simon Gennard
Adapted from Fibrous Soul exhibition text, 2024
