“For Arsenal, Slavs and Tatars present The Naughty Nasals, an investigation into language as a source of political, metaphysical, and sensuous emancipation. With their trademark mix of high and low registers, ribald humor and esoteric discourse, the artist collective addresses the thorny issue of alphabet politics—the attempts by nations, cultures, and ideologies to ascribe a specific set of letters to a given language—with a series of sculptures, installations, textiles, and printed matter. (…) The Naughty Nasals addresses the nose as a site of sonorous resistance to the political and nation-building usage of scripts, or alphabets. The Ѫѫ(Wielki Jus) and Ѧѧ(Mały Jus)–nasal sounds that have disappeared from most Slavic languages but remain as ą and ę in contemporary Polish–function as mobile confessionals, to one of the lesser known, aborted attempts to Cyrillicize the Polish language. The organs of language represent a distinct zone of libidinal linguistics: the teeth, or lips, mouth, tongue, neck, or ears. The Naughty Nasals looks at these erogenous areas as a space of rupture, or break from the norm.”
(fragments of the text accompanying the exhibition)
>> More informations about exhibition on Arsenal’s website
fot. Maciej Zaniewski / Galeria Arsenał
