Voicing the Political: The subject of the sentence

In this session we will navigate between the writing we hear onscreen and voiced printed text. We will consider ideas including the self in art and under law, anger and its abstraction, and the possibility of political agitation through unruly aesthetic experiment. Alongside an introduction by Sarah Hayden of Lis Rhodes’ film A Cold Draft (1988, 28’), poet Vicky Sparrow will consider the making of art as agitation and provocation in the work of poet, artist and radical activist, Anna Mendelssohn (1948-2009). Together, we will seek out connections between Mendelssohn’s experimental poetry and the visually and vocally disruptive work of Lis Rhodes.

This season’s study sessions address vocality as a phenomenon at the confluence of embodiment and technicity, the individual and the collective, interior and exterior, sound and sense. Each session will comprise screenings, collective readings, and listening experiments. By discussing language-based artistic and literary practices, we will work together to interrogate the politics of how voice is used, represented, imagined and heard.

Voicing the Political has been programmed as part of Voices in the Gallery, an AHRC-funded research project, led by Sarah Hayden at the University of Southampton in conjunction with John Hansard Gallery and Nottingham Contemporary. The event is part of a series of discussions about the materiality of text and of the speaking voice in contemporary moving image.