Samson Young’s Sonic Explorations Reveal Unseen Histories of Territories, Conflict, and Separation

By Tessa Solomon

Birdsongs burst from behind the crowd, or maybe just ahead of it, in the corner. Its trills bounce and ricochet off the gallery walls. The sounds clearly denote distress. Eventually its source is revealed: high above, a performer dressed in a police uniform plays along to a tape of birdsongs witSamson Young’s Sonic Explorations Reveal Unseen Histories of Territories, Conflict, and Separationh a bird whistle. The architect of the performance, Samson Young, projects the sound through a long-range acoustic device—a non-lethal sonic weapon designed to scare away birds but more ominously used by law enforcement to disperse protestors. At full volume, it can cause permanent hearing loss.

He performed the piece, titled Canon, continuously over several hours at Art Basel in Switzerland in 2016. Audience members wandered through rooms filled with materials related to the 1979 Vietnamese refugee crisis, when 2,700 asylum seekers were stranded aboard a cargo vessel for four months after being denied entry to Hong Kong.

Like most of Young’s recent work, it confronted the historical misuse of sound as a tool to corral listeners behind borders. It was also an invitation to imagine how sound can transcend confinement: the birdsong of Canon rebuked the device’s aural violence...READ MORE