The Weight of Words

Caroline Bergvall with Ciarán Ó Meachair

Born 1965, Hamburg, Germany

Say Parsley 2001-23

This audio-visual installation adapts to its site of display by embracing local dialects and political history. The title evokes one of the most horrific recent examples of a shibboleth: a custom or practice used to distinguish one social group from another. On the border of the Dominican Republic in 1937, tens of thousands of Creole Haitians were massacred because they failed to pronounce perejil (parsley) in the accepted Spanish manner.

Bergvall’s mix of recorded voices and one-word video frames speak with and against one another. Together they create a psychoacoustic space for listening and reading in which mis-speaking and mis-hearing become shared problems. The current iterations created with Ó Meachair deploy Irish and English in a still deeply uneasy traffic.

Caroline Bergvall is a French-Norwegian interdisciplinary writer, sound artist and performer. Her work has been presented internationally, and she is the author of five books. Her accolades include the Cholmondeley Award and the Prix Littéraire Bernard Heidsieck-Centre Pompidou.

Anthony (Vahni) Capildeo

Born 1973, Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago

Word Fishing 2023

The green-black façade of the Henry Moore Institute is clad with Ubatuba granite, a natural stone quarried in Brazil that compresses millions of years of mineral history. The flecks of colour and highly polished surface give it a watery appearance that captures dappled reflections.

Brought to life by illustrator Molly Fairhurst (b. 1995), Capildeo’s specially commissioned poem reimagines the façade as though looking down through water and time, with layers of aquatic life evoking layers of language.

Shoals of word-fish swim across the surface, each emphasising a different vowel sound. Five hand-written phrases bend and pull on the surface of the image, like tidal lines or glints of sunlight. The phrase dear heart breathe encourages visitors to re-tune their attention as they enter the building.

Anthony (Vahni) Capildeo is a Trinidadian-Scottish inter-media writer who works with poetry, fiction and visual gestures, including installations, performance and traditional masquerade. They are the author of eight full-length books and numerous pamphlets. Their accolades include the Cholmondeley Award and the Forward Prize, and they are currently Professor and Writer in residence at the University of York.

Simone Fattal with Etel Adnan

Born 1942, Damascus, Syria

Five Senses for One Death 2020

The imaginations of sculptor and editor Simone Fattal and her long-term partner, poet and painter Etel Adnan (1925-2021), meet in this work. Its title and content come from a poem first written in ink and watercolours by Adnan in 1969.

Throughout the poem, five-counts recur – trees, candles, fingers, nights, mountain peaks – most poignantly in a tender confession: “they tell me there are four seasons / but I live in a fifth one / which is your space / and your time”. Fattal re-inscribed the poem, this time with oxide on the polished fronts of seven squares of volcanic rock, shortly before Adnan died aged 96.

Etel Adnan was a Lebanese-American poet, essayist and painter. She is the author of many books, including novels and poetry collections. Her visual art has been the subject of solo exhibitions internationally, including at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, and the Serpentine Galleries in London.

Simone Fattal is a Syrian-American artist who works across painting and sculpture, often through ceramics. Her work has been the subject of solo exhibitions around the world, including at MoMA PS1 in New York, Bergen Kunsthall, ICA Milano, and Whitechapel Gallery in London. In 1980s California, she founded the influential small publisher, Post-Apollo Press.

Emma Hart

Born 1974, London, UK

Good Vibrations 2023

Hart’s handmade ceramic circles manipulate the traditional design of a target, perhaps used for archery, by pulling the bullseye down to the position of a mouth on a face. The concentric circles become a symbol for a mouth and noise: a speaker and their speech act radiating out in sound-waves.

Hart represents speaking as a performative act, but also suggests that those who speak out may become targets, especially women. The thirteen repetitions form a coven of witches projecting their spell. With a playful silence, they form a colourful chorus dedicated to the magic of oral culture, to recitation and enchantment, and to the power of giving presence to absent voices casting a spell over the viewer.

Emma Hart is a British artist who makes sculpture, photography and installations. Recent exhibitions include solo shows at Barakat Contemporary in Seoul and Fruitmarket Gallery in Edinburgh, as well as group shows at the Hayward Gallery in London and Kunsthaus Hamburg. Her accolades include the Max Mara Art Prize for Women and a Paul Hamlyn Foundation Award.

Bhanu Kapil

Born 1968, London, UK

Twelve Questions 2001/2023

Kapil’s acclaimed book The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers was the first full manuscript she completed, written while living in London and feeling out of place. The storylines of this book-length poem weave together sensuous, intense and confusing experiences of self-discovery, evoked by people, objects and smells. They are structured as responses to twelve questions.

For this exhibition, Kapil spreads those same questions into a different kind of space – the gallery – turning them on their head so they ascend a staircase that leads to a locked door. Heading up, only to be sent back down, Kapil’s vertical interrogation responds to the architecture of the gallery and the restriction of movement.

Bhanu Kapil is a British-Indian poet. She is the author of six full-length books of poetry. Her accolades include the Windham Campbell Prize and the T.S. Eliot Prize. She lived in the US for two decades and is now a Fellow of both Churchill College, Cambridge, and the Royal Society of Literature.

Glenn Ligon

Born 1960, New York, USA

Warm Broad Glow 2005

“Rose laughed when she was happy but she had not the wide, abandoned laughter that makes the warm broad glow of negro sunshine.”

The novella Three Lives, published in 1909 by Gertrude Stein (1874-1946), contains a series of racist descriptions, one of which Ligon used in this, his first ever neon sculpture. Ligon painted the front of the tubing black to eclipse the statement and create a halo of white light, a brightness that is both actual and symbolic, radiating from and around the quoted phrase.

Ligon’s quotation is a poetic act of taking back the very idea of Black joy, an act of reclaiming some resistant presence with a different kind of glow. By casting a beloved writer’s words in a very different light, Ligon’s work is a reminder of how pervasive the racist imaginary still is.

Glenn Ligon is an American artist who works conceptually with text and painting. His work has been the subject of solo exhibitions around the world, including at the Whitney Museum in New York and Power Plant in Toronto. His accolades include a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Skowhegan Medal for Painting.

Mark Manders

Born 1968, Volkel, Netherlands

Window with Notional Newspapers 2023
Floor with All Existing Words 2005-23

Manders thinks of his sculptural process as an ongoing act of writing. In 2005 he invented his own newspaper, initially as a prop for his installations. The Notional Newspapers series has grown from there with a simple premise: to use every word in the English language once, regardless of order. Like any newspaper the layouts feature photos, in this case of his studio, most often featuring dust.

For Window with Notional Newspapers, the newspapers have been used like protective sheets to cover the entrance to the galleries, creating a membrane between the inside and outside of the exhibition. For Floor With All Existing Words, the recently completed series of Notional Newspapers are spread out, compressing all the words in the dominant language as if left behind by the last person who read them.

Mark Manders is a Dutch-Belgian artist who works with sculpture, drawing, and publications. His work has been the subject of solo exhibitions around the world, including at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo and the Art Institute of Chicago. He represented the Netherlands at the 55th Venice Biennale and his accolades include the Heineken Prize for Art.

Doris Salcedo

Born 1958, Bogotá, Colombia

Untitled 2008

Salcedo made her Untitled works from 1989 to 2008 to commemorate the victims of political violence during two generations of civil war in her native Colombia. In this version of the series, she interlocks pieces of domestic wooden furniture by pouring concrete into their negative spaces, fusing them like scar tissue.

The unease expressed by two materials that do not belong together, or by poets of exile like Paul Celan (1920-70), are central to her work. The precise but stark flood of concrete entombs the space left behind by the everyday people who would have used these everyday pieces of furniture. The unbearable weight of loss is concretised, literally and metaphorically, by the sculpture’s near-500kg mass.

Doris Salcedo is a Colombian artist who makes sculpture and installations. Her work has been the subject of solo exhibitions around the world, including at the Guggenheim Museum in New York and Tate Modern in London. Her accolades include the Nasher Prize for Sculpture and the Velázquez Visual Arts Prize.

Parviz Tanavoli

Born 1937, Tehran, Iran

Standing Heech 2007

Heech means ‘nothing’ in Farsi, the modern Persian language and the official language in Tanavoli’s home country of Iran. Tanavoli has repeated and adapted his heech motif since 1965.

The word is made up of three Persian letters: he, ye and če, which he pushes together into different shapes. The Persian letter h is popularly referred to as the ‘double-eyed H’ because of its face-like shape. Tanavoli extends this anthropomorphic quality by mounting the h as the head of his single symbolic form, which the sculptor stands upright and likens to a person or even a poet: “a nothing that brimmed with life itself”.

Parviz Tanavoli is an Iranian sculptor, painter, educator and historian who has written widely on Persian crafts and history. Solo exhibitions of his work have been presented around the world, including at the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art and West Vancouver Museum of Art. His life and work are the subject of the documentary, Parviz Tanavoli: Poetry in Bronze, released in 2015.

Audio description

Download transcript for this audio description of Standing Heech (PDF, 0.2MB)