Unbidden Tongues #9: Potty Mouth

Produced on the occasion of the exhibition Unbidden Tongues #5: Theresa Hak Kyung Cha: Between the Teeth at Manifold Books, Amsterdam, November 28, 2021 – January 22, 2022.

​Drawing on artist, poet and filmmaker Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s extensive and largely unexhibited archive of ‘work on paper’, Unbidden Tongues #5: Between the Teeth is a publication-turned-exhibition and the fifth title in the series. From never-realised film scripts to concrete poetry and artists statements written intimately in the first person, the collection of material selected for this occasion presents the varying ways with which Cha drew on her personal and familial experience as an immigrant to conceptually grapple with language and its mediation and suppression, particularly, in this case, in its written form.

From the beginning, Unbidden Tongues has claimed to publish 'previously produced yet relatively uncirculated work by cultural practitioners busy with questions surrounding civility and civic life-particularly in relation to language and its administration.' However, over the course of the first nine issues, the 'civic' aspect has been relatively less pronounced, though undeniably subtextual. As such, Professional Agitator-a publication that includes two landmark feminist articles by Jo Freeman-is an attempt to bring civic responsibility more overtly to the surface. While first penned in the 1970s, the articles have a timely relevance, not only because, shockingly, many of the issues on the bill for the women's movement at Freeman's time of writing-employment discrimination, affordable childcare, reproductive rights and sexuality- are back on the table in the U.S. and elsewhere with full force, but also because, in thinking intersectionally as the movement taught me to do, we find ourselves in a moment of necessary and urgent mobilisation for Palestine; with speaking up and out being reprimanded with various forms of organised silencing. 

(From the foreword)

Unbidden Tongues #7: Continuity Girl unpacks the ‘forensic feminist methodology’ developed by writer, curator and administrator Naomi Pearce. Informed by research conducted in various personal archives of women administrators of artist studio spaces in London from the 1970s until now, the components of Pearce’s writing span mortuary field notes, interview transcripts, intimate first-person accounts and an auto-fictive mystery novella. These various evidentiary approaches blend to form an unconventional casebook that puts forward the complicating factors underpinning the process of writing history in the first place.

In this particular title, the biographical lens focuses on Shirley Read—a photographer, writer, teacher, administrator and oral historian, whose work has been largely overlooked, until now.

„Ungenießbare Zeichnungen“ is a series of visual traces by artist Shin Kudo. „Ungenießbar“ means „Unenjoyable“ in German, which is a term that is used to describe a certain category of fungi, considered not edible but also not poisonous. What is enjoyable and what is not? For whom should it be enjoyable? Spores, Blood vessels, nature energy, Alien….Shin Kudo’s intuitive drawing triggers our feelings between our daily world and the world that we often overlooked - The world full of life circling and endless streaming.

The book contains 24 drawings from the “∞” series and the spore print series “The Unknown Friends”, following with an interview conversation with the artist. 

This book brings together a selection of photographs by artist Mekhitar Garabedian, documenting the warehouse of his late father’s company, Melantex, which exported second-hand clothing from Belgium to the Middle East, Asia, and Africa. The images inspired a one-year sculptural intervention by Garabedian, commissioned by the Antwerp Public Art Collection.

Import—Export, Friperie tells a compelling personal and collective story of how displacement can be turned into economic livelihood while creating connections between old and new homes, languages, and textiles.

The photographs are accompanied by an in-depth conversation between Garabedian and curator Samuel Saelemakers about the relationship between photography and sculpture, public representation, and diasporic thinking.

Printed on thick cardboard, this book throws you right back into the child-like explorer mode we know from when we were young. It illustrates the mindful written words of Lisa Gutscher journey through the inner body based on a large archive from found images, screenshots and other image sources to unfold a whole new world in front of your eyes.

Fifty years after the fall of Saigon, Dao Strom’s Yellow Songs vibrates with the ramifications and ripples of Empire. Each of the four Yellow Songs books reckons with the intimate consequences of the colonial project, reconfiguring them into complex and lucid, literal and figurative songs of selfhood. Embodied, critical, wholehearted, collective, personal, genre-defying—Yellow Songs renders the brute force of history with tender precision. Art book quality printing in full color with felt paper inserts.

Yellow Songs 1: Voiced-Voiceless unearths, unwinds, un-bodies the violence of stigma, reclaiming the ventriloquized voice of David Bowie's "China Girl” through a lyric-critical essaying (assaying) of cultural tropes, racialized and gendered power plays, and memory.

By way of archiving, digital translation and reproduction, Philip Poppek extracts from Magritte’s word paintings twenty-six letters; segmental symbols of a textual system form an alphabet of a, with a familiar apple punctuating a provisional end to the sequence. A poetic correspondence with the letter a speculates on the prehistory of this alphabet, as though searching for some indication as to how we may have come to where we are now, in this ‘post-factual moment’.

Maybe at some point we fell into the foxes’ den, only to re-surface in a landscape of ruins. This book poses a number of necessary questions, perhaps beginning with: ‘Which feminine noun trails after the title script ‘est pas une?

Pomme? Pipe? Histoire? Communauté?