Carlos Amorales, Erkan Özgens & Carla Zaccagninis
Out of Words
We depend on language to make contact, to share experiences. We also turn to language in our struggle to both describe and understand the world we live in. But sometimes there are no words… and other forms of expression are called upon. The works by Carlos Amorales, Erkan Özgen and Carla Zaccagnini, gather around silences, at the point where we sense the limits of language and the urge to tell a story differently begins.
Carlos Amorales presents Life in the folds, an installation centred in an undecipherable alphabet; an alphabet with which to question how we produce meaning, and a language that carries the remarkable potential to decide anew how to communicate with each other. In the installation this alphabet is used to tell the story of an immigrant family that arrives to a hostile village.
In Erkan Özgen’s video Wonderland, Muhammed, a 13-year old boy, tells us with his body and a multitude of gestures, what cannot be expressed in words, the story of the traumatic experiences he had in the war and in escaping the war.
Carla Zaccagnini’s installation Elements of Beauty: A tea set is never only a tea set reanimates the stories of the attacks on works of art made in the struggle for women suffrage in 1913. The destruction of images was implemented when the frustration for not being heard in their pledge for justice reached a limit. The work explores the power of gestures and images over words, and of words over images.
These works suggest there are other forms of communicating that produce horizons of meaning which our ordinary language cannot even anticipate. They propose that what is grasped with the imagination, is not anything that can be said with sentences. The whole body and being plays a part in the activity of expressing and resonating, for communication is by no means a job for the voice or the written word alone. A gesture is precisely that, a silence that can answer cleanly for our words.
