stutter

September 9 - October 14, 2017

Visitor Welcome Center presents stutter, a group exhibition featuring original works by Joeun Aatchim, Matt Austin, Sonia Louise Davis, Tempestt Hazel, Douglas Kearney, Kameelah Janan Rasheed, and Suné Woods.

This exhibition is organized around the stutter, characterized as a communication disorder in which fluency of speech is disrupted by repetitions, prolongations, and stoppages. The stutter interferes with the economy of flow. It is an obstacle to overcome, yet a perpetual insistence of agency. The phonemic struggle is an emotional effort that induces a breakdown in communication. But there is potential in the collapse -- the lingual delay, the moment of time reclaimed. Stutter erodes fluency’s order and pulls her listener close, demanding that her interlocutor reconfigure his faculty of listening. The erosion alters the presumed flow of communication, and reroutes the capacity for exchange.

The artists in this exhibition examine notions of the stutter by insisting on it as a vehicle for emotional and political reflection. Through the glitch, the collision, the erasure, the works in the show expose vulnerabilities within feeling, language, technology, and political systems. The works ask us to reconsider our unsettling affairs with freedom and progress – both in the individual and the body politic – by revealing the slow process of sharing and living with difference. The stutter is the potential and the struggle; the nexus that gives breath to an active rearrangement of life and love.

co-organized by iris yirei hu


Artists:
Joeun Aatchim, Matt Austin, Sonia Louise Davis, Tempestt Hazel,Douglas Kearney, Kameelah Janan Rasheed, and Suné Woods