Karen Mirza & Brad Butler, Hold Your Ground, 2012, still

Alex Cecchetti, Lucy Clout, Sabel Gavaldon, Gudrun Hasle, Fiona James, Frances Loefler, Henning Lundkvist, Karen Mirza & Brad Butler, Lorena Muñoz-Alonso, Gro Sarauw, Vladimir Tomić, and Werker Magazine.

Kunstraum, London, 2014

A programme of events, presented as part of Kunstraum’s ongoing Morphologies programme, brought together artists, curators and writers to share their thoughts on language and its morphologies through moments of performance, screenings, conversations and discussions. Morphologies focused on artists working with new developments in languages, exploring the interdependent relationship between language, culture, history and politics.

 

Language is made to be obeyed not believed

With Vladimir Tomić, Alex Cecchetti, and Frances Loefler

Screenings of works by Vladimir Tomić and Alex Cecchetti, which in different ways show the relationship between power and language, how language can be used as a tool of manipulation and how it in turn can be manipulated.

 

No poem is intended for its reader

With Gudrun Hasle, Gro Sarauw, and Lucy Clout

No poem is intended for its reader brings together the work of three artists whose practice refuses expected forms of communication, highlighting and insisting on the quality of the imperfect, the unimportant, or the incorrect. In their work Clout, Hasle and Sarauw create situations in which language is performed and performs itself in a search for new layers of meaning.

 

New grammars of the body in protest

With Karen Mirza, Brad Butler, and Sabel Gavaldon

Taking Karen Mirza and Brad Butler’s Hold Your Ground as a starting point, New grammars of the body in protest will look at the role of the body in public space. How can political minorities propose new forms of occupying public space? How do we imagine and practice new (bodily) languages of protest? And what are the implications for how we embody the collective?

 

The thing made real

With Fiona James, Henning Lundkvist, and Lorena Muñoz-Alonso

Through exercises of self-expression The thing made real will focus on the shortcomings and potentialities of language. While Fiona James experiments with attempts at forcing the language of thought as a means to examine the importance of necessity, Henning Lundkvist questions the process of thinking and making in a move towards a pre-linguistic realm.