• Wende Museum (Culver City, CA)\ Saun Santipreecha. [O-I-RI-R]. April 27, 2024 - September 15, 2024. Installation at the East German Guardhouse.

  • Documentation of the installation is available here.

“The title is derived from Schoenberg’s twelve-tone compositional technique (Prime, Inversion, Retrograde Inversion, Retrograde) and embodies the positions and permutations we assume in relation to one another, and to history. The anchor—Prime 0—in this case is myth and myth’s relation to systems of power as embodied in tonality, itself a system that has anchored myth for centuries. The installation is hinged between the visual and the aural, the fixed and the unfixed, and explores, among other things, sound as a medium that both goes beyond borders and yet erects bolder ones when systematized as music. Here, the familiarly tonal East German national anthem Auferstanden aus Ruinen, a stand-in for the many worldwide musical embodiments of myth, is deconstructed via the twelve-tone matrix and re-constructed in distorted fragments, through a trumpet solo performance. These recordings, played back through an old speaker horn mounted within the guardhouse, interweave this myth with recordings of historical witness accounts of experiences under systemic oppression, and yet what we always initially lean into is the more legible structuring of sound: music. These sounds are further distorted through a copper sheet placed in front of the speaker horn in which images selected from the museum’s historical archives are embedded and then unfixed via the physical hammering of the sheet itself. As in the work’s title, the entirety of the work is framed by the guardhouse, displaced through time and space yet still framing our present and our relation to myth and power.” (Artist’s statement on the installation.)

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The ADN (Allgemeiner Deutscher Nachrichtendienst) Pförtnerhaus—or, the General German News Service Guardhouse—is a structure currently placed in the garden of the Wende Museum in Culver City, California. The Guardhouse was originally located at the entrance to the parking lot for headquarters of the General German News Service, the state news agency in the German Democratic Republic, in the Berlin-Mitte precinct.

This (last remaining) guardhouse was acquired by artist Christof Zwiener in June 2013, and subsequently brought to Los Angeles in September 2014—at the time of the 25th anniversary of the dismantling of the Berlin wall. Following its arrival in Los Angeles, several artists (after Zwiener) engaged in works with the Guardhouse, including: Bernd Trasberger, Sonya Schönberger, and Friedrich Kunath.

The Guardhouse has been housed at the Wende Museum since the structure’s initial displacement to Los Angeles. The structure continues to be used as a site for artwork installations, including Saun Santipreecha’s exhibition [0-I-RI-R].

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For references and further historical context see:

https://esmoa.org/experience/adn-guardhouse/

https://wendemuseum.org/exhibition/key-delivery/