Watershed, with a contribution by James T. Hong, 2023. Sound installation, PVC sculptures and transducers. Dimensions variable, 40 min, 6 pieces. Courtesy of the artist. Special Thanks to Goethe-Institut Taipei. Commissioned by Taipei Biennial 2023.
Natascha Sadr Haghighian is an artist based in Berlin and Tehran who investigates the structural and sensory underpinnings of collectivity and migration. In a new commission for the Taipei Biennial 2023, Sadr Haghighian creates a multichannel sound installation in the courtyard of Taipei Fine Arts Museum intended as an anti-monument, a sonic environment that embraces experiences of loss and erasure as a counterbalance to preservation and restoration.
Watershed features a series of six sound sculptures, distributed over the courtyard, whose amorphous shapes are vague assemblages of possible bodies. Fitted with sound conducting transducers to become resonant material, the sculptures play an approximately 30-minute spatial composition comprising field recordings, dialogues, and elements of popular music. A modular synthesizer patch created in collaboration with Taiwanese-American filmmaker and artist James T. Hong interacts with the six-channel composition. The sound piece also corresponds with surrounding sonic events, such as the frequent passing of jet planes overhead. The work captures intergenerational lingual shifts and gaps to trace changing social and geopolitical relations as well as disappearances of vocabulary.
Sadr Haghighian dedicates Watershed to the caretaker, a figure who compensates for the frailty of another person, but senses their own increasing vulnerability in the process. Often lost in the urgency and immediacy of keeping another alive, or delivering gracefully into death, the caretaker asks for little acknowledgement. Yet no amount of love, duty, or strength can prevent the caretaker from diminishing, and often disappearing into the needs of the person being cared for. For Sadr Haghighian, the intensity of this encounter is enough to enter another realm where distinctions between selves and others dissolve into more cruel and yet more abstract forms of relation.
