singing through the grass

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.