"Dandelye—or, Beneath this River’s Tempo’d Time We Walk" Debut Solo Exhibition: Saun Santipreecha WOVEN HISTORIES: A Two-Part Performance Composed by Saun Santipreecha. Soloist: Anna Kostyuchek Electronics: Chen Shen July 8, 6pm – 9pm. …. As part of his debut solo exhibition, Saun Santipreecha has composed WOVEN HISTORIES, an experimental violin piece set to be performed (in two movements) by Ukrainian violinist Anna Kostyuchek this upcoming Saturday, July 8. The first performance will take-place at 7pm. The second performance, which is aurally and temporally intertwined with the first, will occur at 8pm. An artist talk will be held between the two performances (7:10pm – 8:50pm). Electronics performed by Chen Shen. An extension or mutation of his sound sculpture included in the exhibition, LET THE WIND SPEAK, LET WATER TURN TO GRAINS OF SAND, INTO GUSTS OF WIND, this doubled performance is, in its most primal moment, a metamorphic and circular sequencing of time and place. Situated between the social and the material, it is also an examination of how historical narratives come to be articulated, responding to the limits of musical structure through political questions of borders and bodies’ positions in relation to ideological constructions of identity, place, and difference. Though this questioning is ultimately aimed towards the anywhere and anyone of a universal, the particular instance of this work is also intimately linked to current crises, such as Russia’s ongoing war on Ukraine. Performed in front of the triptych THREE ELEGIES, the layering of space and time through cycles of repetition, memory, repression, and interpretation is fractally present between the sonic and visual composition of the piece. The three panels embrace the performer like the entrance of a cave or the cusp of a cliff, revealing a deep terrestrial ground that tries to contain the violin’s ghostly shiver, but only ever amplifies its howls. …. “WOVEN HISTORIES continues my exploration of cyclic time and its possibilities in sound and music. I applied the ideas of LET THE WIND SPEAK to an acoustic instrument, the violin in this case, writing a piece that begins and ends with the same note and elongates into a shadow within. As the soloist performs, a morphed recording begins to play what sounds like ghosts but is actually an electronically manipulated recording of the rehearsal of this piece against the soloist, making it a kind of duet of past and present. The piece originated about a year ago as an exploration of the long shadow that trauma casts across one’s life or across the history of a nation. I found intriguing the idea that the morphed past becomes practically unrecognizable in a similar way to how trauma in particular, over time, seems to dissipate into an invisible shroud through which we experience, often taking a long period of time to unravel, if possible at all, its origins. The notation of the piece itself is one of my first experiments in completely removing ‘time signature’ and allowing the performer themselves to massage, manipulate and present time through their perspective, also rendering each performance different (while the piece itself still being loopable). Thus the entire piece (three printed pages) is technically one bar and is written in a vaguely atonal musical language, again returning to the concept of constant questioning of position—here some notes maybe vaguely suggest a possible key but always shifts and turns, never being grounded or concretized in any certain key, blowing ever in the wind, like seeds of a dandelion—Dandelye (an English translation of a Thai translation of an English name with roots in French and Medieval Latin). THREE ELEGIES began as a contemplation on the war in Ukraine and the questioning of the arbitrariness of borders as well as the stoicism many women, including my mother, maintain through harsh and abusive situations. These were explored through a dialogue between two poetic works which are very close to my heart, Anna Akhmatova’s ‘Requiem’ and Edith Sitwell’s ‘Three Rustic Elegies’, from which the triptych’s title takes its reference. As such the works contain many layers of watercolor, acrylic, oil, ash, cheesecloth and cement, each veiled (and framed) by an/other layer, framed further by pieces of fragmented dropcloth worked over with various inks, dyes, gessos and shredded paper and being walked over for days before being arbitrarily segmented; finally framed by the three panels which make up the work.” …. Image (Installation View): “Three Elegies” Triptych. 2023 96” x 60” each. Oil, acrylic, watercolor, charcoal, ash, cement, cheesecloth, drop cloth, shredded paper on canvas.