October 24, 2019
Curated by Patricia Cariño Valdez
Chief Curator of Soundwave 9: Tanya Gayer
DIALECTS considers Szu-Han Ho’s personal history and delves into her interest in the tonality of language. It is one of the projects for Soundwave 9 and will take place at the Contemporary Jewish Museum.
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 <<giam seng di>> 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 the 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 Soundwave 9, Szu-Han performs DIALECTS with Bay Area collaborator Sandu Ndu, weaving together diasporic narratives with abstracted dance beats and harmonies to consider transformations and dynamism in migratory movements.
Soundwave is a San Francisco Bay Area organization operating at the intersection of art, technology, and music—co-presents this performance as a part of the ninth edition of their innovative Soundwave Festival, focused on the theme “of Time” at venues across the Bay Area. This year's festival features 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.
Camera and editing by Miguel Novelo
