CCS BARD

the lips, the teeth, the tip of the tongue presents artworks as if they were a chorus of voices that resound with multiple narratives and histories. Borrowing from various methodologies of attention, the exhibition asks the audience to attend to the various hands at play that collide in each work, confronting the inherent gaps that lie therein. the lips, the teeth, the tip of the tongue invites the audience to embody these strategies through a featured script, provoking deeper engagement. Ranging from sculpture to paintings and works on paper, works by the following artists enter into dialogue: Alexandra Bircken, Nikita Gale, Glenn Ligon, Marisa Merz, Frida Orupabo, Naudline Pierre, R. H. Quaytman, and Danh Võ.

Some of the works on view refuse flattened characterization. Frida Orupabo’s large-scale collages, for instance, reconfigure fragmented materials from various archives into composite figures that confront histories of racialized representation, weaving together lines from different stories to build a new one. Other artists emphasize a unique relation to space and the viewer, as visible in R. H. Quaytman’s practice of painting on photographic silkscreens of particular sites, which produces a collage of projections infused by the artist’s manipulation of perspective. Still other artworks—like Nikita Gale’s RUINER XVI (2022), made from sound-dampening terry cloth and metal armatures that evoke barriers—suggest infrastructures (such as the concert venue or the street) that mediate physical movement and information-keeping, wrestling with negative spaces: what is left absent and the traces that remain.

Rather than providing closed answers, the exhibition invites us to grapple with the slipperiness of meaning, foregrounding how interpretations inherently become altered from ear to ear, from mouth to mouth.

the lips, the teeth, the tip of the tongue is curated by Alma Chaouachi, Lila Gould, Bruna Grinsztejn, and Devon Ma.