We all inhabit a location in time, space and history that shape our thoughts and actions. With the group exhibition Where We Speak, we want to look at the impact of the coordinates from which we speak and ask how they inform our viewpoints and perspectives.
We rarely think of our oral cavity as a place. It is a site that marks a transition from inside to outside and from personal to public. The mouth is a threshold—reaching within us and beyond us. A translation that extends from our inner selves into the world.
Drawing inspiration from the caves in our mouths, the spatial arrangements that have always served as places of refuge or as sites for the transmission of history and knowledge, the exhibition is dedicated to the connection between space and discourse and envisions our oral cavities as playgrounds for critical negotiations. In Where We Speak, space is understood as a cultural system of interpretation that generates social attributions and situates associated fields of action. Contrary to the assumption of a "neutral space", the works on display reveal their personal, social, (geo)political and imaginary coordinates within space.
Where We Speak is dedicated to an interrogation of language as a cultural technique, forms of informal knowledge production and the significance of social and political localization. Likewise, origins and migration, along with their associated realities, ruptures, fantasies, and future designs, are repeatedly addressed and considered in the exhibition.
Imagined landscapes, ghostly or fragmentary presences, remembered and lost (living) spaces and re-readings of historical and cartographic settings as well as speculative buildings materialize in the exhibition in several bodies, voices and objects and bring together artistic positions that ask about the "where" in our speech and gather intergenerational and intercultural dialogue of plural feminisms.
KUNSTVEREIN BIELEFELD
Welle 61
33602 Bielefeld
Thu - So 12:00 – 18:00
Mo-Wed, by appointment
T +49 (0) 521.17 88 06
F +49 (0) 521.17 88 10
kontakt@kunstverein-bielefeld.de