Four-channel sound installation, green LED tube lights, 14:30 min
Sap Script, 2023
White latex paint, black enamel paint
Passages: SEA AiR – Studio Residencies for Southeast Asian Artists in the European Union
NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore
Sap Script, 2023
White latex paint, black enamel paint
Passages: SEA AiR – Studio Residencies for Southeast Asian Artists in the European Union
NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore
Sap Sonic is a four-channel sound installation that explores the sonification of images, transforming visual archives into an exercise in listening. Drawing from the Sumatra Caoutchouc Company album, a colonial-era photographic record from the Rijksmuseum Collection that documents rubber plantations in Sumatra, the installation reimagines these visuals through an auditory lens. It employs inference, extrapolation, and speculative reconstruction to unearth the latent sonic possibilities embedded within the images.
By translating textures, gestures, and absences into sound, Sap Sonic challenges the authority of the visual archive and questions what remains unseen, unheard, or deliberately omitted from historical records. Through layered compositions of found sound and synthesized elements, the work materializes the labour, extraction, and ecological entanglements evoked by the photographs.
Sap Script extends this inquiry, reinterpreting Sap Sonic’s sonic vocabulary to move beyond the plantation as both a noun and a verb. The accompanying wall text, Whirring Forces, Humming Fields, explores the materiality of language. Rendered in white latex paint against a black oil enamel background, the text assumes a spectral presence. Its composition visually resonates with the undulations of sound waves and the regimented linearity of rubber tree plantations.
Lettering Design: Studio Darius Ou
Images Credits: NTU CCA Singapore
By translating textures, gestures, and absences into sound, Sap Sonic challenges the authority of the visual archive and questions what remains unseen, unheard, or deliberately omitted from historical records. Through layered compositions of found sound and synthesized elements, the work materializes the labour, extraction, and ecological entanglements evoked by the photographs.
Sap Script extends this inquiry, reinterpreting Sap Sonic’s sonic vocabulary to move beyond the plantation as both a noun and a verb. The accompanying wall text, Whirring Forces, Humming Fields, explores the materiality of language. Rendered in white latex paint against a black oil enamel background, the text assumes a spectral presence. Its composition visually resonates with the undulations of sound waves and the regimented linearity of rubber tree plantations.
Lettering Design: Studio Darius Ou
Images Credits: NTU CCA Singapore