Listening Session #2: Audrey Chen | Beamsplitter

20-21 Jan 2026

BEAM SPLITTER – Audrey Chen and Henrik Munkeby Nørstebø is a duo for amplified voice, trombone and analog electronics, bringing their own brand of highly amplified dialog, which is as intimate as it is equal amounts raw and entirely exposed.

SOU will present Beamsplitter’s first concerts in Thailand at Noise House Lat Phrao (Bangkok) and at Rong Sa Dang (Chiang Mai) on the 20 and 21 of January 2026 respectively.

BEAM SPLITTER have been touring globally since 2015, playing over two hundred concerts in a wide variety of spaces and contexts, bringing their own brand of highly amplified dialog, which is as intimate as it is equal amounts raw and entirely exposed. They join together their two individual voices into a distinct language that delves beyond the borders of the corporeal elements of un-processed voice and trombone, while utilizing analog electronics to offset their hyper extended physical play.

Listening Session #1: Halim El-Dabh w/ Kamila Metwaly

05 Jan 2026

SOU Initiative presented in Chiang Mai a listening session with Kamila Metwaly, Artistic Director of MaerzMusik (Berliner Festspiele), exploring the sonic continuum of Halim El-Dabh — a pioneering Egyptian composer and electronic music visionary.

The session focuses on Taabir El Zaar (1944), one of the earliest electronic music works, composed in Cairo. Emerging from ritual and early electronic manipulation, the piece dissolves boundaries between ceremony and technology, archive and futurity.

Through listening as an ethical and political act, Metwaly opens space for re-orientation — hearing El-Dabh’s work not as fixed heritage, but as a living, unfinished archive that continues to resonate across diasporas and contemporary sound practices.

Hai Anh Trieu is a Vietnamese-German filmmaker, we screened her film Birds of a Feather on the 03 Jun 2019 and organized a screening tour of the film at Sàn Art (Saigon), Six Space (Hanoi) and Jam (Bangkok)

FRAUD (Audrey Samson & Francisco Gallardo) developed their work Seeing Like A Tree from 01-30 Apr 2019 and presented their research on the 28 of Apr 2019. They structured a performance that interrogate algorithmically generated patterns based on the modelling dynamics of predictive systems used in the governance of natural resources, using Teak plantations as a case study.

Hung Tzu Ni developed a site specific performance during her residency stay and performed Seven Days Of Insomnia on the 17 of Aug 2019 at extantation. She explored the reciprocal relationship formed between light and sound. As each element is respectively constructed and embodied in a given space. An analog light sequencer is triggered by a crystal prism and step motor, structuring the space with refracted light, the occasional appearance of rainbow-colored light, and the reflections that trace an orbit around the contours of the space.

Shian Law is a Malaysian-born Melbourne based artist who works across the disciplines of choreography, live art and trans-media performance. He was a resident artist from 13-31 Mar 2018. His commission portfolios include a number of national festivals and institutions, such as Dance Massive Festival, Sydney Dance Company, Next Wave Festival and National Gallery of Victoria. He received Tanja Liedtke Scholarship and Ian Potter Travel Grant to work in Berlin and New York, and international residencies at Cité International des Art as well as Ménagérie de Verre (Paris).

Realized with the support of the Australian Arts Council.

Tan Vatey and Sinta Wibowo were resident artist from 15 Jan –  04 Feb 2018 developing their joint research [re-enacting memories]. Playful and poetic practices of “being present” without a need “to present” knowledge, aesthetics or any stage-worth content, and explores the openness to connection. This itinerant and sideways-moving series comments on the trend in Asia and other ex-colonial regions of re-writing, re-reading, re-editing, re-claiming their histories. Would it be a step towards “modernity” and “progress” when taking distance from oral tradition (like in African cultures) and non-verbal transmission (like in Asian cultures)?

Kakushin Nishihara is a Japanese avantgarde Biwa musician who we hosted from 26 Nov – 05 Dec 2017 and presented her performance at extantation on the 02 Dec 2017 together with local Khene legend Chaiwat Phumprajum.

Their performance inaugurated the series ]extantating<>interstices[, which was our attempt at creating a critical incubation space for performance-based artists to come together at e x t a n t a t i o n to collectively meditate on the above questions through dialogue, improvisation and reflection focusing on auto-reflexive processes and not outcomes, a process in constant re-evaluation of itself.

Realized with the supported of the Japan Foundation.

Bettina Knaup was a curator in residence from 09 – 29 Nov 2017. We facilitated her research into the work of Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook and facilitated the connection and interviews with the artist. Her research explores the performance practices of a diverse group of artists as contributions to materialist knowledges on a micropolitical level and asks how these modes of knowing and being can resonate and create further impact through curatorial work. Considering that materialist work poses deep challenges to curatorial practice, especially its representational and anthropocentric modes, the research is designed as a case study, which will be based on intensive conversations and engagements with the artists and in which I will experiment with non-human centred, non-representational, entangled modes of curating.

Realized with the support of the Goethe Institute.

Zarina Muhammad was residency artist from 18 – 24 Jul 2017. She is an independent researcher, curator, arts practitioner and educator based in Singapore. She has held an enduring interest in occult medicine, possessing spirits, anthropomorphic entities, chtonic and seafaring deities, magico-religious belief systems, ritualistic ceremonies, sacred sites and the intersections between the worlds of the otherworldly, invisible, material and the contested ideologies and dynamics of global modernity.

She lectures mostly on art/cultural history with a focus on ethnographic and historical studies on Southeast Asia at LASALLE College of the Arts. Currently, Zarina is working on a multidisciplinary research project on cultural translations pertaining to Southeast Asian ritual magic, sacred sites and the tracing of mythological roots, translations and divergences of the feared, desired and revered (supernatural) body in Maritime and Mainland Southeast Asia.