The installations, videos, and sound works by London-based artist Anna Barham deal with ethical issues related to digital speech recognition. The exhibition is on view until June 14, 2026.
In a digital context that leads us to believe in seamless and uninterrupted communication, physical friction in language becomes something that must be smoothed out. Systems such as automatic speech recognition (ASR) are shaped by hegemonic ideas about which voices count, which accents are legible, and which forms of language are worthy of recognition.Â
Artist Anna Barham (1974, England), who is presenting her first comprehensive solo exhibition in Germany at the Badischer Kunstverein, seeks ways in her practice to resist this smoothing of language and instead devote herself to the untranslatable. Barham literally brings the linguistic finds that ASR does not understand to life in her installations, videos, and sound works.Â
Her artistic research confronts highly topical questions of ethics in language technology, auto-correction, and text recognition, offering forward-looking possibilities for decoding the potential of language that is excluded from the norm and using it against ubiquitous forms of authority.
Exhibition dates: February 13 – June 14, 2026
The exhibition is supported by the Innovation Fund for the Arts of the Ministry of Science, Research, and the Arts of Baden-Württemberg.
