When Words Fail was an exhibition at HilbertRaum, Berlin in Sep 2023 that brought 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.
The following works were included:
Anke Becker (2012–ongoing) Economic Words; series of newspaper clippings from the Financial Times with text blacked out, leaving behind words and phrases removed from their original context.
Erik Bünger (2022) Nature See You; video, 19 minutes. Shortly before the 2015 UN Climate Change Conference, a video went viral featuring a gorilla named Koko who had been trained to use American Sign Language in order to address world leaders. Reflecting on the inherent contraction of a wordless creature using words to communicate a message, Bünger’s video deploys a sign language avatar to comment on Koko’s use of language.
Ivor Cutler (1976) A Wooden Tree; audio track from Cutler’s 1976 album Jammy Smears. Built around the refrain, “Hey look, there at the back / a wooden tree / isn’t it a pretty one?,” the song’s lyrics waver between sense and nonsense, the childlike jollity of the music undercut by an ambivalent coda, “we keep on singing / because we’re optimists.”
Lise Harlev (2022) To Be From Your Country; silkscreen print on embossed aluminium, from a series of eight works. Included were two pairs, with each pair comprised of the voices of two people in an intercultural relationship.
Pablo Pijnappel (2016) From Admiration to Shyness; video digitised from 16mm film, 7 minutes, book. Performer Oliver Bulas follows instructions from a Brazilian manual for TV and film actors that describes in detail how to use facial muscles to enact 36 distinct expressions. The performer, acting out each expression in turn, remains unaware of the particular designated emotion he is embodying.
Dave Ball (2023) A to Z: From Eagle to Eyelet; performance with Conor Fallon, Beatrix Joyce, Vicky Lane, Akash Ravi, Ilana Ullman and Ross Warren. Over a duration of five hours and nine minutes, a short improvised scene was performed for every word in the dictionary beginning with E in alphabetical order.
