M/Other Tongue

‘I have but one language – yet that language is not mine’, wrote Jacques Derrida in what is supposed to be an autobiographical essay, reflecting on the loss of one’s mother tongue as a consequence of colonialism in Algeria.

But in what language does one write memoirs when there is no mother tongue? Whatever language we speak, and no matter how proficiently we master that language, the truth is we never quite own it. Language is an implant as much as it is a product of discipline and domestication. It is a foreign body within one’s own body. ‘I have but one language – yet that language is not mine’. Departing from this paradox, this exhibition is meant to be experienced as a passage between languages. A proliferation of voices whose identity remains in question. Some of them appear to be thrown into absolute translation. Others provide a line of flight from native culture and the politics of cultural belonging. Away from national identity and its dominant linguistic forms. A line of flight from the authority of the mother tongue. This exhibition wants to be a place from which to conjure up those voices that sound the most alien to us, not because they belong to another language, but because they are foreigners in their own language and so they make ours foreign to us.

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M/Other Tongue interrogates language politics and cultural identity through the work of five international artists whose practice is not widely known to a London audience.

The exhibition presents for the first time in London the work of two artists, Iñaki Garmendia and Mónica Restrepo. Originally produced on the occasion of the Taipei Biennial 2003, Iñaki Garmendia’s work Kolpez Kolpe [Blow by Blow] consisted of inviting a Taiwanese punk-rock band to perform songs by Kortatu and Zarama, two flagship bands from the so-called Basque Radical Rock scene of the 1980s. Beyond the cultural and historical specificity of these songs, intrinsically linked to the collective imagination of leftist pro-independence movements in the Basque Country, there is the transnational language of rock culture with its globalised gestures, sounds and rhythms, which are immediately recognisable for any audience. Here Garmendia presents the documentation of this performance, which took place in a stage-like structure built by the artist, alongside a display of archival materials including historical posters and fanzines.

Tacones (in the making) by Mónica Restrepo recreates scenes from a lost film with a soundtrack that does not match. In this performance recorded in 2014, a group of the artist’s friends and collaborators read out aloud a series of dialogues from a musical film produced in Colombia, intermingled with testimonies from the actors, technicians and salsa instructors that participated in the shooting. In a picturesque adaptation of West Side Story, Pascual Guerrero’s original film Tacones (1981) chronicled a rather unlikely confrontation between gangs of salseros and disco club-goers in the streets of Cali. Restrepo’s remake of this lost film is a ventriloqual tour de force: there is a confusion of times, voices and contradictory accounts, in which identity reveals itself as an ever-unfinished conversation.

Olivier Castel was invited to produce a newly commissioned work in response to the themes of the show. Castel’s work connects the two adjacent gallery spaces of Tenderpixel — 8 and 10 Cecil Court — implicating the viewer in a play of reflections, echoes and doublings that extends into the reflective surface of his sculptures. Installed in the gallery storefront windows, Melted Metal consists of two blades floating at eye level, in which a series of cut-up phrases and oblique statements are projected, including citations by the likes of Édouard Glissant and Paul Valéry (“What would we be without the help of things which do not exist?”). In Castel’s work, the artifice of language is made visible together with its violence.

Anna Barham’s text-based drawings consist of intricate word architectures and arborescent structures made of
anagrams of the phrase “Return to Leptis Magna”. Her series Ampler Tongue Transit (2012) forms an ever-proliferating
network of verbal permutations, including bewildering combinations of words such as “mutant lisp generator”,
“muttering anal tropes” and “stranger latent opium”. Subject to a high degree of chance and unpredictability, her
improvised drawings are the recording of a thought process that ventures into the labyrinth of language. Barham’s video
Argent Minotaur Slept (2012) presents an animated section of a large volume of text, of which we perceive nothing but
shifting fragments, challenging the viewer’s capacity to generate readings as words break into pieces and language
goes into meltdown.

Going beyond mere documentation, Katarina Zdjelar’s videos touch on the bodily dimensions of language politics, by
exploring the labours of speech and calling attention to the power relations that affect speakers in the moment of the
utterance. Shoum (2009) depicts two Serbian workers struggling to decipher the lyrics of a nineteen-eighties pop
megahit. While The Perfect Sound (2009) portrays an accent removal class for immigrants conducted by a speech
therapist in Birmingham, a city that is ironically best known for its strong accent. The therapist imparts an allegedly
neutral English —the Queen’s English— to his student so as to eradicate the inflections that mark him as a foreigner in a
highly stratified social context.