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Middling English

  • "This show is a must-see if you're interested in transcultural developments!"

    —Sarah Thompson

  • "Caroline Bergvall explores language as the restless, unstable shaper of cultures, places and identities. Every phoneme, tic and syntactical nuance in a given utterance, spoken or textual, is a potential vehicle for meaning."

    —Will Montgomery, The Wire

  • "Bergvall's austere and expertly engineered recordings create an addictive ritual out of her voice, which hypnotizes with braids of polyglot unconscious."

    —Christine Hume, Rain Taxi

  • "Aborder le travail de la poète contemporaine et artiste Caroline Bergvall sur le médiéval, c'est s'interroger sur l'étranger et sur la place de l'étranger dans le contemporain tout autant qu'au Moyen Âge."

    —Vincent Broqua

ELEMENTS

1 headphone piece, 2 sited soundworks, 2 vinyl text on walls, 1 wall of broadsides, 1 architectural structure, 4 hanging weights, 4 broadsides. Broadsides could be taken by audience.

TEAM

Adam Parkinson: Soundwork, spatial sound design
Zahra Mani: Soundwork “Personal Cropper”
DvsN & John Hansard Gallery team: Architectural structure
Alex Prokop: Broadside design
Nicolas Rowe: reading

OVERVIEW

Middling English investigates modes of writing from the printed letter to a loose realm of audio, graphic, kinetic and perceptual writing and reading environments. The exhibition brings together multi-sensory elements — spoken pieces, audiophonic compositions, printed broadsides. Textual works combine Chaucerian contemporaneity with bilingual audioworks and the persistent memory world of pop lyrics.

This is the first installation in which I explored various aspects of historic English. Some pieces introduced here are later explored as independent projects: 1DJ2MANY, CROP and the text sequence “Shorter Chaucer Tales” published in Meddle English.

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REVIEWS

Installation: MIDDLING ENGLISH (2010)

Film retracing objects and sounds of solo installation Middling English. Includes on site interview. John Hansard Gallery, Southampton.

Filmed & edited by Erica Scourti. Produced by Caroline Bergvall.

In conversation: with Stephen Foster

Around MIDDLING ENGLISH solo show. Caroline Bergvall talking to Stephen Foster, director of the John Hansard Gallery, 2010

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