The audio/video installation titled Liquid Tongues, opens to the public on May 9 at the Polish Pavilion in the Giardini della Biennale, running through November 22 as part of the 61st Venice Art Biennale.
An official opening ceremony takes place on Wednesday.
The project challenges what co-creator Daniel Kotowski calls "phonocentrism," the widely held assumption that voice-based communication is the superior, or even the only valid, form of human expression.
"We draw inspiration from water, from the complex communication system of whales, which operates not only through sound but also through vibrations and movement," he said.
Visitors, he added, will be confronted with a central question: "Is there only one basic form of communication in the world?"
The exhibition brings together Deaf and hearing communities through a multisensory experience combining music, silence, physical choreography and vibrations released at selected moments into the exhibition space.
At its heart are two video screens: one mounted on a wall, presenting a narrative thread, and a second suspended from the ceiling, designed to give visitors the feeling of being underwater. A large bench/bed placed in the center of the room allows visitors to lie back and look up at the overhead screen.
Curator Ewa Chomicka described the films as built from sequences of stories exploring loss, rebuilding and the recovery of cultures and languages.
Among them is an account of a North American indigenous community that used sign language as a shared means of communication among both deaf and hearing people, a story about the qilaut drum and the recovery of the songs once played on it, traditions nearly erased by what Chomicka called "the brutal colonization" of Greenland, and a tale of humpback whales, usually solitary animals, now forming communities off the northern coast of Africa.
A recurring figure across the stories is a whale rider. Drawn from Maori mythology, and subject of a 2002 film by New Zealand director by Niki Caro, the whale rider or Paikea figures prominently in Maori storytelling.
The project also references the work of American biologist Roger Payne, who in the 1970s released a recording of whale songs, a gesture credited with helping pull the animals back from the brink of extinction.
Kotowski explained that the exhibition's choir, the Movement Choir, composed of both deaf and hearing performers, performs, sings and signs a libretto co-written with artist Bogna Burska.
"We were fascinated by how, and whether at all, it would be possible to achieve a communicative connection between a human being and a non-human one," he said. "We tried, through sign and spoken language, to reflect the way whales call to one another."
Choreography was created with Alicja Czyczel, and music composed by Aleksandra Gryka.
The result, Kotowski said, is "a multilayered, polyphonic super-language containing elements characteristic of whale communication, Deaf communication and hearing communication."
Poland's Culture Minister Marta Cienkowska called the project "brave, beautiful and absolutely unique," saying it presents deafness not as a limitation but as a value, and models a "soft, non-polarizing" form of communication.
"It shows us how important attentiveness in communication is, how much escapes us when we use very strong, aggressive words and gestures," she said.
The theme of this year's Biennale is "In Minor Keys," a phrase referring to the possibility of building communities based on shared identity and to, in Chomicka's words, "building subtle forms of resistance to dominant narratives."
The Liquid Tongues exhibition is curated by Ewa Chomicka and Jolanta Woszczenko and the Polish pavilion at the 61st Venice Art Biennale is commissioned by Agnieszka Pindera, director of the Zachęta National Gallery of Art in Warsaw.
(rt)
Source: PAP