Kristina Buch: You can’t walk unless the word runs.

“The practice of glossolalia, speaking in tongues, is tied to the common understanding of religion, yet it reflects the very inverse of religious practice. Where religion is realized through fixed rituals and overseen by an institutional fear of loss of control, glossolalia breaks through this seemingly safe choreography, galloping unharnessed and free. The tongue begins to speak independently of its owner, uttering the language of undiluted spirit.

Who are we, independent of the language we use to communicate with each other? If written text and spoken word are the constructs that assemble our reality, there is an ongoing stirring to reverse-engineer an understanding of the phenomena of Derridian logocentrism. Postmodernism promised to reveal the illusion through deconstruction, yet the castle still stands and the moat grows ever deeper. And so we look for ways around these edifices. By cutting words into pieces and allowing them to grow into new forms, like flatworms ever regenerating, Kristina Buch shapes a nuanced understanding of the syllables that bridge knowing to the known, and the unknown to the yet-to-be-knowable.

‘You can’t walk unless the word runs.’ Here, the ear picks up the sound of layered utterances. We are invited into the space beyond the rigid didacticism of both the religious and the postmodern, far past our tongue-tied faith in that which can be constructed and deconstructed. A series of videos, shown on flat screens, share the exhibition’s title. As though the walls have anthropomorphized and grown a garden of human mouths, each screen presents a close-up curtain of lips that open and close, revealing tongues that press delicate and fiery messages against walls of teeth (…).” Aimee Walleston, 2019  Click here to read more

Kristina Buch (born 1983 in Meerbusch, Germany) holds an MSc in Biology and studied Protestant Theology, before doing her MA in Sculpture at the Royal College of Art, London and at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf (with Rosemarie Trockel). In 2012 she participated at dOCUMENTA (13) and in 2015 at Istanbul Biennial. Her works have been shown at the Bundeskunsthalle Bonn (2018), MALBA / Buenos Aires (2017), Kunsthalle Bremerhaven (2016), ISCP NYC (2016), Kunsthalle Basel (2015), Index The Swedish Contemporary Art Foundation (2014), Emily Harvey Foundation NYC (2013), Manifesta9 p.e. (2012), among others. Kristina Buch collaborates with Robert Logan on protolexicon.org and tongue-fm. The GAK Gesellschaft für Aktuelle Kunst presents Buch’s first comprehensive solo exhibition.

Curator: Regina Barunke

Parallel on view:

GAK Projekte:
Esther Adam
February 1–March 1, 2020

Library:
Louis Lüthi. Un R est un M qui se P le L de la R
February 1–April 19, 2020

GAK Projekte:
Christine Moldrickx. Ein Kopf
March 14–April 19, 2020

Exhibition program 2020:

GAK40 – 40 Years Gesellschaft für Aktuelle Kunst
January 1–December 31, 2020

Was machen Sie um zwei? Ich schlafe.
May 23–August 9, 2020

Art at the Frontier of Film Theory: Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen
September 19–December 20, 2020

The GAK Gesellschaft für Aktuelle Kunst was founded in 1980 in Bremen as a non-profit art association (Kunstverein) and is one of the leading small-scale institutions for contemporary art and discourse in Northern Germany. In 2020 it is celebrating its 40th anniversary.