Middling English

Middling English was an exhibition of multi-media writings about the English language. The works used English as a milieu to seed ideas about the practice of language. Accenting bi-lingualism artists have developed a praxis that investigates fields of forces experienced by speakers on the limits of foreignness and fluency. The exhibition consisted of sound, installation, sculpture, and image-texts and was therefore intermedial in the practical sense of the word. The exhibition Middling English was cohered by this central sculptural structure; lengths of wire weighted by bright orange dumbbells, described as [a] site specific mobile structure flowing along the dynamic lines of the gallery space itself. The structure is both navigating and obstacle, orientating and disorientating. It is somehow linguistic, with the lengths halted by weights like punctuation marks. This piece yields significance for the whole project as it illustrates a mobile sense of projective space. It references behind and in front, before and after. It is a topological design concerned with relationality, giving architectural momentum to the gallery visitor going into the gallery space, into media and a sense of language.Middling English by Caroline Bergvall with our contribution was launched at The London Art Book Fair, 24 26 September.nrpages: p42 - p49status: publishe