Exhibition
Murmur - Waterside Project Space
Whereas the highly rational societies of the Renaissance felt the need to create Utopias, we of our times must create fables. - Francis Alÿs
A low, indistinct and continuous sound, murmuring evokes the telling of stories or rumours that conjure powerful mental pictures. Murmuring otherwise connotes an endless babble of visual and verbal information - the point where language fails and meaning collapses.
Underscoring mechanisms of verbal imagination and visual enactment, linguistic rupture and the dissolution of the image, murmur explores fiction-making as a means by which to critically reorder the data of experience, frameworks of memory and limits of perception.
The artists in the exhibition have mined sources ranging from folklore and literature, to history and cultural theory, selectively reiterating and placing ownership over information, language and images that otherwise slip into an anonymous stream of murmuring. The artworks raise enquiries on existing social narratives, rationalities and systems of belief as the artists attempt to spin new fables from borrowed plots by deploying fiction as an evaluative strategy; a blank space from which to recall, to speak and to perform.
Featuring newly commissioned titles and works previously not shown in the UK, the project brings together video, installation and sculpture works by Anita di Bianco (US/DE), Aoife Collins (IE), Trong G. Nguyen (US), Kate Pickering (UK), Erika Tan (UK/SG), TinTin Wulia (ID) and live performances by Lynn Lu (UK/SG) and Matthew MacKisack (UK) due to take place on the First Thursday of December.
