1880 THAT is the first London exhibition by Berlin-based artists Christine Sun Kim and Thomas Mader is all about sign language and how it has been suppressed. Kim is deaf and the show is full of an impassioned - pleasingly pissed-off actually - cry for the right to communicate.
‘1880’ refers to the year of a crucial congress in Milan which debated Deaf education. Thanks to the presence of Alexander Graham Bell, the congress established the superiority of oral education over sign language in Deaf schools; Bell has skin in the game, since his father was a pioneer in lip reading and Visible Speech. Following the conference, the teaching of sign language was sidelined and suppressed, resulting in exclusion and stigma for Deaf people.
‘THAT’ refers to an emphatic expression in ASL (American Sign Language) that adds weight to the preceding sentence, here used with stinging frustration.
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Indeed this exhibition is funny and exasperated and an often angry look at what happens when you are living with the threat of losing your language.
Using a combination of video and Pop Art sculpture - and bricks representing the walls put up - the show playfully but powerful makes its points; literally, in ‘ATTENTION’ where giant red arms inflate to point at Parliament, demanding policies for inclusion, but then collapse into limp exhaustion. Is anyone at all paying that attention?
I loved Look Up My Nose, a cluster of noses modelled on Bell’s and his father’s which hangs from the ceiling and has a drum attached which is pounded every few minutes so you can feel the vibrations in the air, as a Deaf person might, while also cocking a derisive snook at the stuck up Bell twats, as a Deaf person definitely would.
What’s Left is a film in which the pair reimagine a Sesame Street character called Lefty the Salesman who used to sell letters of the alphabet to Ernie. Here, Kim, as Lefty, tried to sell Mader things like invisible ice cream and some air, to comment on how absurd it is for a language to become illegal and to be disappeared.
1880 THAT hits you like a brick over the head, but somehow also makes you smile.
1880 THAT is at the Wellcome Collection until 16 Nov
