Lippard’s exhibition “Story not Story, Part II” is a continuation of her exhibition “Story not Story” having taken place at LA MAISON DE RENDEZ-VOUS, Brussels last month. It features the new sound installation No Networks as well as Lippard’s Negative Curses (2021) from her on-going series of Curse-tablets (2018-).
Hanne Lippard has been using language as the raw material for her work for the last decade, processing it in the form of texts, vocal performances, sound installations, printed objects and sculpture. The artist has developed a practice that lies at the confluence of spoken and written word, wherein she appropriates content from the public sphere, chiefly from online sources or from the field of advertising, to investigate how the rise in digital communication and mediation is reprogramming our relationship to language. Lippard intertwines found text with her own material, which she then manipulates through a variety of devices, such as repetition, the shifting of intonation, or the exploitation of homonyms, in order to formulate musings on contemporary life.
She draws upon themes including questions of bodily and mental wellbeing, self-optimization, and living through the lens of social media. By consciously picking at the seams of her found and fabricated texts, Lippard makes us acutely aware of the fragility of language as a tool for conveying meaning and sense. She exposes its flaws, its oddities, its double entendres, and its potential for misinterpretation through series of calmly obsessive utterances that bear an affinity to the iconoclastic literary experiments of the Dada movement.
Both the Negative Curses (2021) and No Networks (2022) are the result of a year of repeated rejection, refusal, and cancellations, both privately and professionally. This constant negation made Hanne Lippard question her own inability to say no, realising that she was often saying yes, only to regret it later on, feeling that it was too late to withdraw once the yes had been uttered, as if it was set in stone. The sound installation No Network (2022) is a looped refusal, resonating an endless spiral of disconnection to an invisible body. Although the connection does not exist, it is unbearably present in its absence, creating its own digital negative space.
at LambdaLambdaLambda², Prishtina
until January 28, 2023