"...These Things That Divide The World In Two...". Saun Santipreecha. May 25 - June 22, 2024.

|
"...These Things That Divide The World In Two..."
Worker: Saun Santipreecha
Duration: May 25 - June 22, 2024.
Location: Reisig and Taylor Contemporary (Los Angeles).
Type: Solo Exhibition.
|
Reisig and Taylor Contemporary is presenting ...These Things That Divide The World In Two... by Saun Santipreecha. This interdisciplinary, multi-media installation is Santipreecha’s second exhibition at the Los Angeles location, and the third presentation of his work by the gallery (following his recent solo presentation in Rome). The immersive work combines sculpture, sound, surface, video, and (live) performance, transforming the gallery into a spontaneously and relationally composed encounter that will endlessly change in response to bodies’ pathways along the space over time.
The exhibition is on view from May 25 through June 22, 2024.
….
Beginning at its title, the work draws inspiration from the writings of Samuel Beckett, with a particular investment in the works of The Trilogy (1951-3); namely, Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable. With this connection in mind, the timing of the exhibition accounts for the event of the 2024 Beckett Conference, Beckett and Justice, which is taking place June 6 - 8 at California State University, Los Angeles. Santipreecha is set to present at the Conference, and will be speaking about the engagement of his artistic practice with the works of Beckett. Referencing his text on the ethical, sound-derived concept of “relational modularity,” Santipreecha will discuss his work in response to the metamorphic structures of language, materiality, sensation, and embodiment in Beckett’s works.
The relational structure of the installation begins with any visitor’s (a subject’s) entry into the exhibition where they will immediately find themselves populating, (dis)ordering, and distorting the shifting system of sounds sculpting the room of the gallery along the contours of a moving body. And while responding to the wandering movements of a visitor’s body, the underlying architecture of the works will also be incorporating various spatial and temporal dimensions of the gallery that are usually ‘left-out’ or regarded as collateral. The outside of the gallery will be (sonically) brought to the inside, and the ‘outer’ subject (a visitor) is brought to the inner-most core of the gallery: its hole, a void (making-room for an other…). The gallery’s physical architecture is deconstructed and rebuilt through sound. However, in this context, ‘the gallery’ and ‘the exhibition’ only occurs or takes place in the event of an encounter with a visitor: there is no gallery, no installation, without somebody being present.
It is in this sense of something being assembled in the same moment as being said where Santipreecha initially finds a sincere and intimate connection to the works of Beckett. This connection is especially evident when considered in relation to The Unnamable, where the reader and the text’s rambling narrator share in the process of constantly displacing and re-shaping the metamorphic body of the narrator with slips of the tongue and misrecognized glimpses of themselves in others. One moment the narrator is some malformed man jammed-into a jar working as a signpost for a local spot, and in the next he is a nearly featureless egg shaped something like an urn or a curled-up, limbless fetus that fills it. What the narrator says, what the reader writes, the body-of the narrator and the text itself-become. In other words, The Unnamable effaces any distance between what is being said and what is being shaped: what form a figure takes as a body. It is precisely at this place between language, sound, body, and ideology where the exhibition begins to find alternative pathways between subjects and systems, selves and others, through atonal structures of sound.[1]
Santipreecha articulates this knotted place, this tangled sonic interval between bodies, as a “relational modularity,” or the unstoppable slippage of a body between mythological systems and their (dis)array-between a body and other bodies. For Santipreecha, the slippages and distortions of a body as a relational context coming between regulatory structures and drifting morphologies, multitudes and monads, provides an opportunity to reconfigure the ethical possibilities of what it means for someone to relate to someone else (or somewhere else).