singing through the grass
Program for Anna Barham’s current exhibition: *delirious mantra*, featuring lectures, readings, and discussions.
Guests include artist Anna Barham, author Ella Finer, and author and scholar Sarah Hayden.
About the exhibition:
In a digital context that leads us to believe in
seamless and immediate communication, the physical
friction inherent in language becomes something that must be smoothed over. Systems such as
automatic speech recognition are shaped by hegemonic
notions of which voices count and which linguistic
forms are worthy of recognition.
Anna Barham (*1974,
Sutton Coldfield), who is presenting her first comprehensive
solo exhibition in Germany at the Badischer Kunstverein, resists this
smoothing of language and instead brings the untranslatable and the
irreducible into the center of our attention. Her artistic
practice combines language with the visual and the performative to
crystallize the associative meanings that may be inherent in a word
but only emerge through a new rearrangement of its
individual parts.
Barham treats language
as both a plastic and an acoustic material, filling the
exhibition with sounds and voices. Hands shape and distort
letters from geometric surfaces; text winds its way through the
exhibition spaces, around and over the institutional architecture and its
fittings; a large-format UV printer
produces words and images; and from the farthest room comes the
ceaseless call of a cicada.
Since 2013, Anna Barham
has been working with the error-prone nature of speech recognition to
unlock new meanings and to bring the materiality of the voice and its interruptions
to the forefront. For the artist, it is precisely these
textures and processes of mishearing that constitute the potential of the voice
. In her new sound work ZYX ( 2026), she regards the errors caused by automatic speech recognition as hallucinations.
What
initially appears to be a misperceived text is instead
a new way of thinking and writing in radical opposition to
automation, standardization, and authority.
Curated by Anja Casser
The
exhibition is supported by the Innovation Fund for Art of the
Ministry of Science, Research, and the Arts of Baden-Württemberg and
runs through June 14, 2026.
Anna Barham ( b. 1974, Sutton Coldfield) lives and
works in London. She works with video, sound, print, installation,
and performance. In her work, she explores language as it
moves between different material forms, technologies, and bodies. Barham studied mathematics and philosophy at the University
of Cambridge before studying art at the Slade School of Fine
Art in London from 1997 to 2001. In 2019, she was Artist in Residence at St John’s
College, University of Oxford. She is a lecturer at the Ruskin School of
Art in Oxford and at the University of the Arts in London, and
is currently completing her practice-based PhD at the University of Oxford.
Her works are included in major collections, including the
Tate, the Government Art Collection, and the Victoria & Albert Museum
in London; SFMOMA in San Francisco; and the Centro Galego de Arte
Contemporánea (CGAC) in Santiago de Compostela.