Exhibition - Ghosts in the Throat: Language, Song, Orality, and Resilience

Curated by Lucy Cotter (Laoiseach Ní Choitir)

We are thrilled to present Ghosts in the Throat: Language, Song, Orality, and Resilience.

Ghosts in the Throat: Language, Song, Orality, and Resilience is a group exhibition that inhabits the space of language and song as oral, embodied, (post)colonial, diasporic, and Indigenous realities. Featuring ten international artists’ engagements with speech, music, and the transgenerational legacies of language, it encompasses video works, drawings, prints, mixed media, installation, and sculpture to create a sonorous and historically inflected linguistic landscape.

One language dies every day, globally, and nearly half of the roughly 7,000 languages spoken on Earth are expected to disappear within 70 years. This exhibition invokes the loss, silencing, and disappearance of languages, past and present, through (settler) colonialism, immigration, displacement, and genocide. It foregrounds the resonance of oral and aural knowledge and embraces the revitalization and resilience of Indigenous languages.

The exhibition’s title draws on Irish author Doireann Ní Ghríofa’s memoir, Ghost in the Throat. It is curated by Lucy Cotter/Laoiseach Ní Choitir in parallel with the writing of her hybrid memoir-in-progress, Between Language – A Love Song.

Participating Artists: Pelenakeke Brown, JJJJJerome Ellis, Patricia Vázquez Gómez, Ana Hernandez, Sky Hopinka, Steffani Jemison, Kite, Min Oh, Clarissa Tossin, Samson Young.

Oregon Contemporary is supported by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the James F. & Marion L. Miller Foundation, and The Ford Family Foundation. Oregon Contemporary also receives support from the the City of Portland and the Oregon Arts Commission, a state agency funded by the State of Oregon and the National Endowment for the Arts. Other businesses and individuals provide additional support.