Despina Stokou. SHOUT!

About

Shout!

To many people, the word “shout” immediately acts as a call to dance, let loose and visit that wild side... It’s in the primal yells of the Isley Brothers’ famous 1959 call-and-response hit ‘Shout!’ or in their ‘Twist and Shout’ of the same year. These are just two in a long list of the hits later appropriated by a dominant white culture, often with little acknowledgement of the cultural precedents or connection to the political realities of African-Americans in the US at that time, or still, today…

I don’t want to hear anymore about how far we’ve come when paid public servants can pull a drive-by on 12-year old playing alone, in the park in broad daylight, killing him on television and then going home to make a sandwich 1

Shout a little bit louder now...

SHOUT! continues Stokou’s exploration of popular culture and political debates as mediated (and distorted) by contemporary public forums. As an artist, curator, and writer, Stokou’s work is concerned primarily with the expression of language in its myriad forms, from blog posts and Twitter comments to press releases and drug prescriptions. Probing the depths (or shallows) of the Internet, Stokou critically examines the conflation of history with trending topics, and the effects of these shifting forms of communication in the physical world. Online conversations dominate the public narrative, yet large swathes of the population still struggle to have their voices heard in meaningful ways.