'Acts of Voicing' project has started in Wuetembergischer Kunstvereing Stuttgart, Germany, since 2011, and the program is changed in terms of the exhibiting city. The project aims to think about a meaning of voice deeply through art works showing various aspects, such as aesthetic, philosophical, political characteristics. In 2013, Total Museum in Seoul introduce the project, and Para Site Art Space in Hong Kong will hold it later on.

The aim is to prize open the existing orders—whether of a sensate, societal, political, spatial, or aesthetic nature—and to introduce thereto foreign elements, that is those which had previously been excluded.

In general a foreign kernel is indwelling in the voice, subsisting either totally inside or totally outside of the body. In the technical renditions of our own voice, this foreign kernel is known to pervade in a shocking way. It seems, as Slavoj Žižek has noted, as though the voice had never completely belonged to the body of the speaker, as if a hint of ventriloquism were taking place while speaking.

Acts of Voicing traces this foreign kernel, that is, this paradox, of the voice—at once familiar and foreign, internalized and externalized, tied to and detached from the body (and words). For it is the gap between the own and the foreign, the inside and the outside voice, that unbolts the space of the political and poetical.

Participating Artists
Bani Abidi, Daniel García Andújar, Anonym, John Baldessari, Samuel Beckett,
Ines Doujak, Juan Manuel Echavarria, Tim Etchells, Rainer Ganahl, Gary Hill,
Ranjit Hoskote, Jacques Lacan, Minouk Lim, Mara Mattuschka, José Pérez Ocaña,
Okin Collective, Anri Sala, Imogen Stidworthy, Rasa Todosijevic, Zhen Zhong Yang,
Katarina Zdjelar, Slavoj Žižek

*image (left)
Seoul decadence, 2013
Single channel video HD
© Okin Collective

Courtesy of Total Museum