DIALECTS draws from sounds, songs, and stories about migration and displacement, both human and nonhuman. Szu-Han Ho’s work explores the relationship between bodies and the places that preserve history and memories. Presented by Soundwave curator Patricia Cariño Valdez.
6:30-8pm at the Contemporary Jewish Museum
$6 CJM Members; $14 general (includes Museum admission)
DIALECTS considers Szu-Han’s personal history and delves into her interest in language. The project germinates from stories of her family’s history in Taiwan: her great-grandfather’s murder, her family’s migration story to the U.S., and their history of owning a tamarind farm in Tainan. This performance emerges from a reflection on the tamarind fruit and its translation in Taiwanese > which means salty, sour, and sweet. Szu-Han finds inspiration in the ways in which language conveys not only meaning, but a method to transmit quality of tones, sounds, and emotions. She asks how both a musical chord and a memory can sound salty, sour, and sweet. Language and sounds bridge time and distance: “I was separated from my mother at a pretty young age for a matter of months when she came to the US. She left a cassette recording of her voice and her singing for me. It’s probably what held me together in some ways. The feeling of being displaced or constantly looking for a home is one that is really familiar to me.” For DIALECTS, Szu-Han invites collaborating vocalists to weave together diasporic narratives with abstracted dance beats and harmonies to consider transformations and dynamism in migratory movements.
About Soundwave:
Soundwave is a Bay Area festival featuring the most captivating sound art and performance experiences. This year the festival's theme is "time" and will feature art parties, performance, dance, video, and music for our boldest, most interdisciplinary festival to date. Artists explore subjects like intergenerational history, the cultivation of safe spaces for healing and joy within black, brown, and queer communities, art grown out of migration and displacement, and our current political reality.
About the Artist
Szu-Han Ho's work in performance, sound, installation, and text addresses the practice of exchange through diverse collaborations and constellations. Recent projects include Migrant Songs, a choral performance art piece incorporating stories and songs of human and nonhuman migration; BORDER TO BAGHDAD, an exchange between artists from the US-Mexico border and Baghdad, Iraq; and Shelter in Place, a sculptural installation and performance inspired by her family’s history in Taiwan. Szu-Han lives and works in Albuquerque, New Mexico and is currently Associate Professor in Art and Ecology in the Department of Art at the University of New Mexico.
About the Curator
Patricia Cariño Valdez is an independent visual arts and public programs curator based in Oakland, CA. Currently, she works at the Oakland Museum of California (OMCA), where she develops public programs that amplify the special exhibitions such as The World of Charles and Ray Eames and Queer California: Untold Stories. In 2019–2020, she will be curating OMCA’s Fiftieth Anniversary programs. Most recently, Valdez curated Super Sarap at Erica Broussard Gallery (Formerly Gallery 6/6/7) in Santa Ana, CA, and in March 2019, an expanded version of the show traveled to Asia Society in Texas. She is one half of Casa de Palomitas, a collaborative research and writing project with Cesar Valdez.