Men Gather, in Speech… – new Cooper Gallery exhibition opens in January
Published On Thu 8 Jan 2015 by Grant Hill
The work of three contemporary artists exploring spoken dialogue and how it relates to political, philosophical and technological developments will be showcased at a new exhibition at Cooper Gallery later this month.
Men Gather, in Speech… is an exhibition of film and moving image art works by Emma Charles, Rose English and Abri de Swardt that opens at the gallery, situated in Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design (DJCAD), on Thursday, 22nd January.
The title is taken from a quote by the political theorist Hannah Arendt, who wrote about the human necessity of dialogue and its essential role in the political sphere. The exhibition considers this proposition in the 21st century when the political efficacy of human speech has been overtaken by technological innovation and the emergence of ‘post-political’ thought.
Cooper Gallery curator Sophia Hao said, “Dialogue in its Classical sense, of which Plato is an exemplar, is a spoken exchange between embodied subjects. Although much critiqued during the 20th century, it is a mode of address that underpins Western philosophy and, importantly, politics. However, the inherent humanity of speech has become an enigma plagued by scepticism.
“Touching upon the theatrical, the fictional and the digital, this exhibition offers a complex mediation upon speech, dialogue and the slow silencing of the political space that had once appeared between us.
“Each of us, according to Aristotle is ‘by nature a political animal’. The three works in the exhibition reiterate this ancient but still crucial observation. Whilst our capacity for speech is enhanced and accelerated by the technologies pervading the contemporary world, the possibility for our speech to be heard by others is paradoxically in danger of being lost. It is from this point that Men Gather, in Speech… sets in motion a dialogue questioning how we speak to others.”
Rose English is internationally recognised as one of the key artists working in performance since the 1970s. Her performance Plato’s Chair was a captivating eighty-minute monologue in which English opened up key philosophical questions and submitted them to her incisive and illuminating intelligence. The exhibition will feature video documentation of this performance that critically appropriates speech as a surprising and eloquent artistic medium.
Abri de Swardt’s I’ll never wear sunglasses again approaches dialogue as a fictional and virtual medium. Stripped of context, the voice and body in the cool virtual light of I’ll never wear sunglasses again become bare technical devices of history, uttering a dialogue that reprises the fragmentation of knowledge in a post-internet epoch.
Emma Charles’ Fragments on Machines unmasks the physical framework of the Internet. Omnipotently pervasive, the data centre sits at the heart of the global digital infrastructure. Codifying speech and the means of dialogue in the 21st Century, these highly elusive machines are cornered by Charles in their silent and splendid isolation behind the facades of skyscrapers in New York’s Financial District.
Men Gather, in Speech… opens with a Preview Evening at Cooper Gallery, DJCAD, on Thursday, 22nd January. Prior to the preview at 4.30pm there will be an In Conversation event with the artist Rose English which will expand upon the works in the exhibition and its theme. The exhibition will remain open until Saturday, 21st February.
More information is available at http://www.dundee.ac.uk/djcad/exhibitions/exhibitions/men-gather-in-speech or by emailing exhibitions@dundee.ac.uk.
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