Hanne Lippard: Language is a skin

Hanne Lippard: Language is a skin
September 3, 2021–February 6, 2022

Making use of her voice as a primary material, Norwegian artist Hanne Lippard (b. 1984) explores the social forms governing speech. Her work, taking the form of sound and text-based installations, probes the voice as a tool of emancipation and alienation in times of hyper-connectivity. Through a collection of works brought together under a title borrowed from the semiologist Roland Barthes’ work A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments, the artist orchestrates the encounter between the body of the visitor, text, and public space.

The feminine voice has always been associated with care (the voice of emotional or domestic space), summons (prophecy, Pythie) or hysteria. Commodified by the current all-pervading productivity, the voice becomes entangled with the machine, to enter then the service sector—in the form of intelligent voice personnel such as GPS, smart speakers, voicemail. In an era of anonymization of speech (Twitter, Instagram) and of knowledge (Wikipedia), of an erotisized disincarnation of the feminine voice (podcasts, dating apps), the latter is approached by Lippard by embodied means. For her first major solo show in France, the artist proposes an experience as a quest for empowerment. Language is a skin explores the notion of anonymity, spearhead of the digital economy which is here juxtaposed against that of the visitor. How can one speak to an audience without lumping it together into a homogenous group? The exhibition also investigates standardization of affects and allowed incapacity to say, for the human body or the machine. It puts in play the disobjectification of the artwork as much as that of the feminine body, in the time of a fourth wave of feminism. Through the display of our own planned obsolescence, Hanne Lippard invites us to rethink the exhibition as a utopic space, that of a possible emancipation or brave space, a space aknowledging diference and fostering dialogue, in a world in which one must give a voice.

Hanne Lippard has recently shown her work in solo shows at KW, Berlin (2017), Kunsthall Stavanger, Norway (2018), Goethe Pop Up Institute, Minneapolis (2019), Furiosa, Monaco (2020), MUHKA, Anvers (2021). A concert by Luci Lippard (Lucinda Dayhew & Hanne Lippard) on October 16, 2021 will complete the exhibition as its last piece.

The exhibition is curated by Agnès Violeau. It is supported by Office for Contemporary Art, Norway, the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Norway, and the Norwegian Embassy in Paris.