Suppose I call a man a horse, or a horse a man

Site Gallery - Artist in Residence

9 February to 23 March 2013

Words and letters form the substance and subject of Barham’s work.  She uses them like a malleable material, fascinated by their unruly and feral potential for meaning.   Ideas of the collaborative nature of language and the possible relationship between sound and meaning will provide the starting point for a series of events and a new body of work, which she will produce during her residency at Site.    

The title of the residency, Suppose I call a man a horse, or a horse a man is taken from Plato’s Cratylus, where Plato creates a fictional conversation about the correctness of names, wondering how a particular combination of letters came to be chosen to represent a given object.  This text was also the starting point for a recently produced animation Liquid Consonant, 2012 which will be screened throughout the residency. The main gallery will be occupied by a modular structure Barham has designed specially for the space and from which she will host a series of discussions and events as well as using it as the site of production for a new HD video work.

With a practice spanning performance poetry to drawing and video, words and the rules that govern them provide a central creative thread for Barham. From their logic on a page; their dissection into component parts; the way they sound as they roll off the tongue; and their anagrammatic qualities, even a single sentence can provide infinite creative possibilities. The philosophical questions that language provokes interact with its plastic and material qualities, and the work that Barham makes plays inside this gap, testing the limits of how far words can be stretched from their original meanings. 

Events:

Residency launch: Saturday 9th February 11am-1pm 

In-conversation brunch with Anna Barham, Bridget Crone, independent writer and curator, Richard D Steadman Jones, researcher of the history of ideas, University of Sheffield and Laura Sillars, Artistic Director, Site Gallery.  

Reading Group: Wednesdays 13 February, 6 March, 20 March

Exploring texts on the ideas of language and philosophy that touch Anna’s work. 

Screenings and Discussions:

Throughout the project Anna will be organising more events as her research unfolds. 

Closing Party: Friday 22nd March 2013, 6pm - 8pm