Museum tour
Free guided tour of the exhibition Anna Barham: delirious mantra
The London-based media artist focuses on topics such as digital speech recognition and its susceptibility to errors. The tour provides insights into the background of the exhibition.
About the exhibition:
In a digital context that leads us to believe in seamless and immediate communication, physical friction in language becomes something that must be smoothed out. Systems such as automatic speech recognition are shaped by hegemonic ideas about 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, eludes this smoothing of language and instead brings the untranslatable and irreducible to the center of our attention. Her artistic practice combines language with the visual and the performative in order to crystallize the associative meanings that may be inherent in a word but only come to light through a new shift in its individual parts.
Barham treats language as both plastic and acoustic material, filling the exhibition with sounds and voices. Hands form and deform letters from geometric surfaces; text winds its way through the exhibition rooms, around and over the institutional architecture and its furnishings; a large-format UV printer produces words and images; and from the farthest room comes the incessant call of a cicada.
Since 2013, Anna Barham has been working with the fallibility of speech recognition to unlock new meanings and bring the materiality of the voice and its interruptions to the fore. 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 considers the errors caused by automatic speech recognition to be hallucinations.
What at first 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 the Arts of the Ministry of Science, Research, and the Arts of Baden-Württemberg and will be on view until June 14, 2026.
Anna Barham ( born 1974, Sutton Coldfield) lives and works in London. She works with video, sound, print, installation, and performance. Her work deals with language that 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 represented in major collections, including the Tate, the Government Art Collection, and the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, the SFMOMA in San Francisco, and the Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea (CGAC) in Santiago de Compostela.
In a digital context that leads us to believe in seamless and immediate communication, physical friction in language becomes something that must be smoothed out. Systems such as automatic speech recognition are shaped by hegemonic ideas about 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, eludes this smoothing of language and instead brings the untranslatable and irreducible to the center of our attention. Her artistic practice combines language with the visual and the performative in order to crystallize the associative meanings that may be inherent in a word but only come to light through a new shift in its individual parts.
Barham treats language as both plastic and acoustic material, filling the exhibition with sounds and voices. Hands form and deform letters from geometric surfaces; text winds its way through the exhibition rooms, around and over the institutional architecture and its furnishings; a large-format UV printer produces words and images; and from the farthest room comes the incessant call of a cicada.
Since 2013, Anna Barham has been working with the fallibility of speech recognition to unlock new meanings and bring the materiality of the voice and its interruptions to the fore. 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 considers the errors caused by automatic speech recognition to be hallucinations.
What at first 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 the Arts of the Ministry of Science, Research, and the Arts of Baden-Württemberg and will be on view until June 14, 2026.
Anna Barham ( born 1974, Sutton Coldfield) lives and works in London. She works with video, sound, print, installation, and performance. Her work deals with language that 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 represented in major collections, including the Tate, the Government Art Collection, and the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, the SFMOMA in San Francisco, and the Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea (CGAC) in Santiago de Compostela.