Exhibition
When Words Fail
8 Sep 2023 – 17 Sep 2023
Regular hours
- Friday
- 16:00 – 19:0018:00 – 22:00
- Saturday
- 14:00 – 19:00
- Sunday
- 14:00 – 19:00
Free admission
Address
- HilbertRaum
- Reuterstr. 31
- Berlin
Berlin - 12047
- Germany
Travel Information
- U8 & U7 Hermanplatz U7 Rathaus Neukölln
When Words Fail is an exhibition of works exploring what happens when the ordinary functioning of language starts to break down. Featuring Dave Ball, Anke Becker, Erik Bünger, Ivor Cutler, Lise Harlev & Pablo Pijnappel.
About
When Words Fail
Dave Ball | Anke Becker | Erik Bünger | Ivor Cutler | Lise Harlev | Pablo Pijnappel
8–17 Sep 2023
Opening: Fri 8 Sep 6–10 pm
Performance: Sat 16 Sep 4–9 pm
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