When Words Fail

Dave Ball | Anke Becker | Erik Bünger | Ivor Cutler | Lise Harlev | Pablo Pijnappel

8 – 17 September 2023

Opening: Friday, September 8, 6–10 pm

Performance: Saturday, September 16, 4–9 pm:

A to Z: Eagle to Eyelet, Improvised

by Dave Ball, Conor Fallon, Beatrix Joyce, Vicky Lane, Akash Ravi, Ilana Ullman & Ross Warren

When Words Fail brings together a group of artists whose works explore what happens when the ordinary functioning of language starts to break down. Through a range of strategies – blacking-out words and effacing meanings in newspaper articles, composing strange and nonsensical songs about wooden trees, using facial gestures to enact specific emotions according to instructions in a Brazilian television actor’s manual, relaying suggestively indeterminate messages about intercultural relationships through public signage, improvising a five-hour sequence of scenes based on every word in the dictionary beginning with E, and getting an avatar to expound (via sign language) on the story of a gorilla that used sign language to persuade world leaders to act on climate change – all of the works in the exhibition highlight the less-than-straightforward relationship between language and meaning, and between words and the things they stand in for.

Curated by Dave Ball