Hanne Lippard for Settantaventidue
The artist will be giving a live reading related to her forthcoming record “Talk Shop”, published by Dischi Fantom in its Sussurra Luce series.
Hanne Lippard has been using language as the raw material of her work for years, processing it in the form of texts, vocal performances, sound installations, printed objects and sculpture. Her work takes its place in a rich history of the performative use of the voice, and the linguistic deconstruction of language, whose genealogy is found both in the fields of music, spoken word, theatre, sound poetry, and art. Lippard has developed works that explore the social forces governing female verbal expression; an expression that has been adroitly shaped since the time of the ancient Greeks as an instrument used for confining the place of women within a restricted social perimeter. The feminine was considered uncontrollable, and its language was fashioned in such a way as to ensure that women were continually attentive to the tone of their own voices and ways of expressing themselves. Until recently, the use of obscene and direct language was generally forbidden to them. Should they resort to it, the concomitant proof of their impurity and uncontrollable nature, supposedly inherent in their use of such language, would be held up against them in return.
Hanging on the walls of the Hypogeum room inside settantaventidue, the series Curses (black) reinterpret Roman curse tablets. The original curse tablets were generally created in the 2nd-4th centuries AD by voiceless, provincial, non-citizens, women or slaves; those whose speech did not count and who saw themselves relegated to the symbolic confines of the Empire. While these tablets promised vengeance, they provided, above all, a release for psychological strain, like the platforms of expression offered by social media today. The artist has composed nine tablets as variations, seen as much as parodies as visual poems.
The artist will be giving a live reading related to her forthcoming record “Talk Shop”, published by Dischi Fantom in its Sussurra Luce series. The reading is a compilation of poems and texts where singular words and sentences are looped and repeated creating a sensory experience of the efficiency and stress found in our private as well as public life. On the occasion of Hanne Lippard’s performance at settantaventidue “Talk Shop” will be presented in a Limited Artist Edition.
”Putting a door on the female mouth has been an important project of patriarchal culture from antiquity to the present day. Its chief tactic is an ideological association of female sound with monstrosity, disorder and death.”
– Anne Carson, Glass, Irony and God, p. 120-21
Hanne Lippard Settantaventidue Via Lodovico Il Moro 1, 20143 Milano Curated by Fantom and Settantaventidue 24 April 2024 settantaventidue.net