7 min. two-channel sound
Kai Middendorff Galerie, solo show, Frankfurt, 2010

The body becomes a complex field of grammars and vibrations in a non-verbal form of communication. Bodily rhythms, chance external interruptions that change the course of those movements—all of these actions occur in our daily lives, both on subconscious and conscious levels.

My starting point for this work began with three sign language jokes on youtube that I edited together through my own system. Each time similar signs in videos were made by the narrators, I made an edit and joined the videos together. The punch line was however always avoided, so it felt open- ended. At all the points of edits between the sign language joke material, I added sign language from the Kodály Method, a system for teaching music to children. The idea of combining humour, children, and teaching music through body gestures made language seem even more explicitly closer to music, but also to the absurdity of humour. This finally produced a seven minute video. I learnt this sequence by heart and performed it in front of a camera, without any later editing made.

While the face generally plays an important role in sign language, I chose to only focus on the hands, creating my own artistic idea of non-verbal language. I took particular care to separate the visual element from the audio in the gallery space, so that sound and vision function independently. To this end, the computer monitor was placed tightly in a corner so the exhibition visitors had to move close together to see the screen. As they did this, their social barriers or safe distances were challenged and strangers began to talk to one another—playing once more with questions of body language.

Video, edit, sound: Mark Schreiber Camera: Bernd Thiele