27 November – 1 December, 2024 – Part of MINU Festival for expanded music
Exhausting a word through repetition tends to dissolve the original meaning to both speaker and listener, as the looping of a word becomes a sort of trance, a state of hypnosis dissolving its cognitive contour. The words endorphins and dolphins end up merging into one word within the mind of the listener, telling a general story without a specific first person narrative, other than that she is female. This loss of meaning also alludes to the loss of self that occurs when one is stuck in a repetitive chain of call and response within the excessive digital threads of communication, and the dopamine high that follows any immediate response. On the one hand one might feel as if one is oversharing, and at the same time it feels as if one has shared nothing at all, leaving you with nothing but a sore thumb.
Hanne Lippard (*1984, Milton Keynes/UK, lives and works in Berlin) has been using language as the raw material for her work for the last decade, processing it in the form of texts, vocal performances, sound installations, printed objects and sculpture. The artist has developed a practice that lies at the confluence of spoken and written word, wherein she appropriates content from the public sphere, chiefly from online sources or from the field of advertising, to investigate how the rise in digital communication and mediation is reprogramming our relationship to language. Lippard intertwines found text with her own material, which she then manipulates through a variety of devices, such as repetition, the shifting of intonation, or the exploitation of homonyms, in order to formulate musings on contemporary life.
She draws upon themes including questions of bodily and mental wellbeing, self-optimization, and living through the lens of social media. By consciously picking at the seams of her found and fabricated texts, Lippard makes us acutely aware of the fragility of language as a tool for conveying meaning and sense. She exposes its flaws, its oddities, its double entendres, and its potential for misinterpretation through series of calmly obsessive utterances that bear an affinity to the iconoclastic literary experiments of the Dada movement.
platform BUNKER 