Between the voice between the words between the work between us

Abstract

'between the voice between the words between the work between us' appears in 'Voice as Form', a special issue of the Oxford Art Journal edited by Dr Pamela Corey and Dr Wenny Teo. Abstract: This visual/text essay reflects and reflects on some of the vocalities, vocabularies and moves in my practice since the mid-1990s, situated across moving image, installation, sound, performance, and text. Invoking the politics of speech, representation and translation, the essay offers a split and at least doubled narrative. A parallel sequence of text fragments – the one unfolding more or less chronologically, the other reversing through a series of concrete image/visual-text works, reconfigured. Then, a reverse partial chronology through images, invoking past projects, echoing and weaving back between preceding narrative fragments. The resulting coincidences, disjunctures and tensions between visual, textual and linguistic registers may suggest shifts between critical and poetic, disciplinary and discursive positions. Siting, losing, unmooring and hearing voices, acts of speaking, writing and listening are always contingent to other words and works, other histories and practices. Always-already tongue-tied and tin-eared, apparently sounding at once ‘very London’ and ‘very Hong Kong village’ – this voice is more parochial than metropolitan, more pidgin than cosmospolitan, more translocal than transnational; and possibly unreliable.