Imogen Stidworthy: Barrabackslarrabang

We are proud to announce our first solo exhibition with Imogen Stidworthy.

Imogen Stidworthy (born in 1963 in the UK) examines the different dimensions of language: its communicative potential, its path through the body, its acoustic, gesticulatory, spatial and mental characteristics. She works with the voice as a material to reflect and question how voice and language locate the subject, socially, politically or culturally. Her installation 'I Hate' had great attention at the Documentat 12 in Kassel in 2007.

In the exhibition Barrabackslarrabang at AKINCI, Stidworthy brings together works referring to very different languages and places, from the Backslang and Scouse of Liverpool to the Papiamentu of Curacao. In the film Barrabackslarrabang (2009), Stidworthy interweaves standard and subverted English (Backslang) with tropes of class and race, trade and desire, in the hidden backwaters and idealized forms of the voice. The film was commissioned for the exhibition ‘XXX Get Off at Edge Hill’ at Edge Hill Station in Liverpool. It draws on images and ideas connected with this site, the birthplace of the railway, where from the oldest platform in the world Stephenson’s Rocket was first run. This is the beginning of consumer capitalism with the speed and spread of goods accelerating to previously unknown levels. The railway also brought about Standard Pronunciation as a solution for the millions of traders and businessmen travelling around Britain, confronted for the first time by accents they could not understand. Backslang developed as a linguistic disguise to protect speakers, especially from the ears of the law. It is associated with working class culture and criminality, the black or grey trade upon which many depend. Like all languages, Backslang is also a space of identification, spoken proudly; it can be seen as a sign of economic and social conditions, but also as a form of resistance - a necessity, or a possibility for different social paradigms.

Topography of a Voice (offset and copperplate print, 2008-9) uses several forms of language to represent an accent. This results in a visualisation of sound which describes the accent while it is not audible. The diagrams of waterfall plots, charting decibels, wavelength and duration are commented upon by local speakers, immigrants, actresses and a voice coach. Stidworthy tries to unravel the relation between accent, voice, geography and identity.

The third work in this exhibition is a series of photographs of residential buildings in Curacao in process of being built, alongside transcriptions of Papiamentu jokes (originally recorded in the public spaces of Willemstad). It also questions the relation between language and identity. Do easily definable identities exist at all? Papiamentu is an extraordinarily hybrid language, having absorbed many linguistic elements of its trading and colonial past. The various butts of these jokes invoke a landscape of social thresholds and borders - like most jokes, they are built on the logic of who gets it and who doesn’t; who is in and who is out.

Imogen Stidworthy has had many exhibitions worldwide, amongst others XXX Get off at Edge Hill at Metal, Edge Hill Station in Liverpool; See this Sound at Lentos Museum in Linz (Austria); the installation Left at the Zacherlfabrik in Vienna, in 2009; Die Lucky Bush, a curatorial project at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Antwerp, Shrinking Cities at Cube in Manchester, in 2008; the installation I Hate in Documenta 12 in Kassel; Works in Translation, at the Digital Arts Laboratory in Holon (Israel); Thessaloniki Biennial, in 2007; Walk On at the Shanghai Biennial; Be what you Want but Stay where you Are at Witte de With in Rotterdam, in 2006; Murmur at TENT Centre for Contemporary Art in Rotterdam; Dutch-non Dutch in the Van Abbe Museum in Eindhoven, in 2005, Becks Futures, ICA London and CCA Glasgow; With Hidden Noise at the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds; Governmentality: How do we want to be Governed at Art Central Miami, in 2004. Stidworthy was nominated for the Northern Art Prize in 2009, won the Liverpool Art Prize in 2008, was nominated for Becks Futures in 2004 and won the Prix de Rome in 1996. She is currently an advising researcher at Jan van Eyck Academy in Maastricht, and is based in Liverpool, UK.

From December 16th 2009 till March 7th 2010, Stidworthy’s film I hate [screen work] is presented in the exhibition Niet Normaal, Difference on Display at the Beurs van Berlage in Amsterdam.

Imogen Stidworthy
Barrabackslarrabang