Unbidden Tongues #8: Feelers

Produced on the occasion of the exhibition Unbidden Tongues #5: Theresa Hak Kyung Cha: Between the Teeth at Manifold Books, Amsterdam, November 28, 2021 – January 22, 2022.

​Drawing on artist, poet and filmmaker Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s extensive and largely unexhibited archive of ‘work on paper’, Unbidden Tongues #5: Between the Teeth is a publication-turned-exhibition and the fifth title in the series. From never-realised film scripts to concrete poetry and artists statements written intimately in the first person, the collection of material selected for this occasion presents the varying ways with which Cha drew on her personal and familial experience as an immigrant to conceptually grapple with language and its mediation and suppression, particularly, in this case, in its written form.

Unbidden Tongues #9: Potty Mouth is a collection of what could be described as concrete poetry, written over the past two years by our niece Violet Bartley, now aged five. Typed at a computer and sent exclusively via e-mail, the poems stand as clear evidence of a person in the beginnings of grasping (at) language. Throughout, characters are repeated uninterrupted until margins break them, keys pushed down by a finger not yet strong enough to lift itself up.

Over the years, as her written vocabulary grew and these attempts at communication slowly stacked up into the collection printed here, Violet delivered poem after poem within which different mutations of the word ‘poo’ were uttered in type: poo, poobum, bum poo, ipoo, poop. While simple, often illegible and definitely isolated utterances (she never replies when you send a poem back in turn), they are decipherable examples of someone learning defiance through language.

From the beginning, Unbidden Tongues has claimed to publish 'previously produced yet relatively uncirculated work by cultural practitioners busy with questions surrounding civility and civic life-particularly in relation to language and its administration.' However, over the course of the first nine issues, the 'civic' aspect has been relatively less pronounced, though undeniably subtextual. As such, Professional Agitator-a publication that includes two landmark feminist articles by Jo Freeman-is an attempt to bring civic responsibility more overtly to the surface. While first penned in the 1970s, the articles have a timely relevance, not only because, shockingly, many of the issues on the bill for the women's movement at Freeman's time of writing-employment discrimination, affordable childcare, reproductive rights and sexuality- are back on the table in the U.S. and elsewhere with full force, but also because, in thinking intersectionally as the movement taught me to do, we find ourselves in a moment of necessary and urgent mobilisation for Palestine; with speaking up and out being reprimanded with various forms of organised silencing. 

(From the foreword)

Unbidden Tongues #7: Continuity Girl unpacks the ‘forensic feminist methodology’ developed by writer, curator and administrator Naomi Pearce. Informed by research conducted in various personal archives of women administrators of artist studio spaces in London from the 1970s until now, the components of Pearce’s writing span mortuary field notes, interview transcripts, intimate first-person accounts and an auto-fictive mystery novella. These various evidentiary approaches blend to form an unconventional casebook that puts forward the complicating factors underpinning the process of writing history in the first place.

In this particular title, the biographical lens focuses on Shirley Read—a photographer, writer, teacher, administrator and oral historian, whose work has been largely overlooked, until now.

Making a fanzine is an act of rebellion, even more so if it is published and produced by a woman. The grrrls of today use them to inspire countless young people around the world, to take control of their lives and to create their own culture. These homemade publications are a quick and cheap way to spread their ideas and dismantle the usual stereotypes. Traditionally hand-drawn, photocopied, and stapled together, the format of fanzines are now as diverse as their subject matter, with online platforms and social networks fast becoming the norm. The fanzine is more alive than ever!

Gemma Villegas runs her graphic design studio based from Barcelona. She works in close dialog with commissioners and collaborators on a broad range of projects, including visual identities, exhibitions, publications, and digital platforms, overseeing the creative process during all the phases of a project. Her work is characterized by a fresh and powerful visual language focused on detail with special attention to typography.

An artist's book presenting a photographic study of onions.

On Onions is a photographic study of onions by artist Elad Lassry (born 1977). Characteristically highlighting the spectrum of hues and shapes for the vegetable, Lassry's selected taxonomy includes sections on red, yellow and white onions, each of which possesses its own distinct taste and benefits. On Onions is Lassry's first artist's book, and the work will exist only in book form; it is at once wry, refreshing and disorienting in its biology workbook style, which makes fruitful use of "the confusion that results when there is something just slightly wrong in a photograph" (as the artist has described his practice in general).

Composed by the artist and arranged by Stuart Bailey, the book includes an essay written by Angie Keefer about the effects of sliced onions on human tear ducts.

Lip Magazine was self-published by women in Melbourne from 1976 to 1984 and stood as a lightning rod for Australian feminist artistic practice throughout the Women’s Liberation era. The art and ideas expressed over Lip’s lifetime track groundbreaking moves in performance, ecology, social-engagement and labour politics—all at an intersection with local realities. Collecting and presenting the materials of Lip for the first time since their original appearance, The Lip Anthology, edited by Vivian Ziherl, privileges the range and dynamism of contesting feminisms that comprised the Lip project.

Designed by: Marc Hollenstein

Jangal est un ouvrage collectif avec la participation d’Ana Pi, Julien Creuzet, Léna Araguas et Éva Barois De Caevel. Il a été conçu lors de l’exposition « Cet ailleurs, qui rejaillit en moi, lorsque je suis là (…) » de Julien Creuzet à la galerie NaMiMa de l’École nationale supérieure d’art et de design de Nancy.

You wake up in the footwell of a mid-sized hatchback somewhere on a highway in outer Bangkok. You compile neurotic spreadsheets of the best ‘party destinations’ in Europe, whilst your work emails pile up without ever being read. You quit your job. You launch a banal start-up. You grieve for a past relationship. You stare endlessly at the waves coming in from a beach in Koh Pha Ngan. You vape intensely. You spend money on feelings, on the performance of your own persona, whilst you observe yourself with a detached sense of horror.

i will pay to make it bigger is a novella, by poet and artist Ahren Warner, in which ‘you’ are the main character. Through text and image – autofiction, docufiction, and just plain fiction – you work your way through a tangle of preoccupations: from what it means to buy enjoyment, to the fragile construction of your own self as a cultural product.

i will pay to make it bigger is also a photobook, a collection of images produced whilst living in Thai ‘party hostels’. Although these photographs might seem to exist as the documentation of intimate or ecstatic moments, they are in fact quite painstakingly, and artificially, constructed: composited and manipulated from multiple still frames of film footage to produce images that advertise the calculated artifice of their own hedonism, emotion and seemingly raw experience.

With a Coda by Hana K. Ohnewehr, commissioned by Yu’an Huang