29 Apr 2026
Sorawit Songsataya has been named Creative New Zealand’s 2027 Berlin Visual Arts Residency recipient. A Thai New Zealand artist currently based in Bangkok, Sorawit will start the year-long residency at the International Studio Programme at Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin, from January to December 2027.
The Berlin Visual Arts Residency supports a New Zealand visual artist with a strong national profile to deepen their practice through sustained international engagement. The residency provides an apartment, participation in the International Studio Programme at the Künstlerhaus Bethanien and a stipend, offering space to develop new work, connect with global peers, and the opportunity to act as an ambassador for New Zealand’s visual arts in Berlin.
Sorawit is a multidisciplinary artist whose work moves across 3D animation, craft, textiles, handmade objects, moving image, sculpture, and more recently sound and voice. Their installations explore how human and more than human worlds are intertwined, with a particular focus on listening, aurality and ecology.
“I work with a range of media to create installations that address and expand on our intricate and entangled relationship with the natural world, our senses of being in the world and experiences of places that are dynamic and layered,” Sorawit says.
On being selected, Sorawit describes a strong sense of responsibility. “Understanding how hard it is for everyone in the current economic and cost of living crisis, I sense a huge responsibility to make every minute count,” they say.
“At this stage of my so-called career, I need to do even better so that a healthy studio and research practice can reverberate back to the creative communities that have supported me.”
Over the past four years, Sorawit’s practice has increasingly centred on our complex relationships to land and place via diverse material textures and sonic experiences. Their current research draws on what they describe as sonic ecology, developed alongside their Listening Device sculpture series.
“I have worked with Ōamaru limestone for a few years, they have led me to better understand my own cultural positions and have guided me on these current artistic enquiries around listening to land as the body,” Sorawit says. “This is partly why I am based in Thailand at the moment, to research specific organic components such as jackfruit wood that becomes parts of many traditional musical instruments, and to further experiment with my Listening Device on my ancestral land.”
Sorawit’s project in Berlin
During the residency, Sorawit will research the Experimental walzen collection, a group of wax phonograph cylinder recordings produced by Carl Stumpf for scientific research into phonetics, tone, and music psychology. These cylinders were an early sound recording medium that captured voices and music directly into soft wax, before flat disc records replaced the technology.
They chose this specific collection as its inception was tied to the recordings of the Siamese court orchestra first performed in Berlin in 1900. Working with a 3D software, the artist plans to generate motions on computer from the archival recordings, allowing voices and sound from the past to animate the present.
The archival recordings, physical objects and Stumpf’s notebooks will inform a new multimedia installation combining sculpture, textural graphic notation, voice animation and performance. Extending on their Listening Device, Sorawit will collaborate with a local choreographer to develop choreographic movements for the sculpture. The project will explore physical textures of sound and voice, tactile sonic memory and aural histories in relation to land, place, and people.
The residency follows textile-based artist Areez Katki, who was based in Berlin at the Künstlerhaus Bethanien in 2025, continuing their research led practice exploring identity, migration and craft traditions.
Find out more about Creative New Zealand’s previous Berlin Visual Arts Residency recipients