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Speech lapse exhibition Nr:2
Freie Universität Berlin 2022
Funded by Friedrich Schlegel Graduiertenschule
Concept and Directing: Omid Mashhadi and Nazanin Bahram
Sound and Video technician: Jule Kriesel
Video Art: Mostafa Qahery
Following Allen S. Weiss’ manifesto on the “subversion of a work” and his theses on the “dissociation of meanings, avoidance of communication, shattering of narration, celebration of solecism, search for an impossible private language to ensure an improbable universal expression”, the proj- ect “A Momentary Lapse of Speech” searches for its own ‘private language’ and at the same time for a critical examination of it. language as a way for man to break out of nature and into the realm of civilization. the perfor- mance is based on the problematization of myths around the faculty of speech and its claim to communicativity. a struggle against the ordered- ness of language and all its products, including narratives, yet a struggle through a language.
a recourse to language not in an appreciative way, but in order to deform it and bring it to collapse. everything constructed on stage with the help of language is subject to implosion.
A meaning-repelling logic within a slippery and indeterminate form, relying on tangled and floating signs that signify relations and dynamics, each time collapsing and failing in their significations and calling for new forms. Through the play with the dualities of the human and the animal, the primitive and the civilized, the historical and the transhistorical, the understanding and the non-understanding, there also arises the subversion of the binary of the viewer and the viewed, testing the scope of the agencies of the viewers and considering them as the real protagonists, thus in a way also deconstructing the hierarchical status of the viewer and the viewed. The performance is, in a way, a search for performative and scenic answers to the questions raised by Agamben about the relations between power and the capacity of language:Does a mute experience exist? Does an infancy of experience exist? A time before the genesis of a subject, a state of being without language.
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