Zosha Warpeha: Shadow, Come

Thursday, February 27th at 8pm, ISSUE is pleased to present Shadow, Come, the first commission from 2025 Artist-In-Residence Zosha Warpeha. Adapting the tuning of her sympathetic-stringed Hardanger d’amore in response to the acoustics of the 22 Boerum Pl. theater, the artist will explore resonance, structural activation, and deep listening through a continuous performance. Throughout her year-long residency, Warpeha will craft immersive experiences that invite reflection on collective memory.

Notes from Zosha Warpeha on Shadow, Come: 

I am interested in exploring the relationship and dialogues between myself, my instrument, and my surroundings in this first solo program at ISSUE Project Room. I was first attracted years ago to the Hardanger fiddle because of its resonance, the echoes of sympathetic strings hanging suspended in the spaces between notes when activated by bow and voice. When I enter a reverberant space that amplifies those resonances, I find that it allows me into a dialogue not only between instrument and room, but between my present and immediate past, communicating with my shadow in real time. Can I activate this room through tuning systems, transforming it into a sympathetic chamber? Does the instrument itself become a set of resonant strings that allows the room to speak, to breathe? Who activates whom; who is listening? Who leads this dance—the self or the shadow?

Zosha Warpeha is a composer-performer working in a meditative space at the intersection of contemporary improvisation and folk traditions. Using bowed stringed instruments alongside her own voice, her long-form compositions and freely improvised performances explore transformations of time and tonality. She performs primarily on Hardanger d’amore, a sympathetic-stringed relative of the Norwegian Hardanger fiddle, and her current work is heavily informed by the cyclical forms, rhythmic elasticity, and the physical momentum of Nordic folk music. Warpeha’s debut solo release on Relative Pitch Records, silver dawn, has been lauded as a “breathtaking dialogue between Warpeha and her instrument; tradition and experimentation; community and place” (Jacob Kopcienski, I Care if You Listen), her compositional process “subverting tradition not as a political act, but as a point of departure” (Peter Margasak, Nowhere Street). Her work has been supported by the US-Norway Fulbright Foundation, Jerome Foundation, Minnesota State Arts Board, and the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund.