BRAVING TIME//QUEER CONTEMPORARY//NATIONAL ART SCHOOL//03.02.2023
We Can All Speak in Tongues was reconfigured and exhibited in Braving Time: Contemporary Art in Queer Australia at the National Art School, Sydney, as part of Queer Contemporary and the broader arts program for Sydney WorldPride 2023.
In this context, the work entered a national queer exhibition framework, where its relation to Pentecostalism, glossolalia, sexuality, faith, and exposure became newly charged. The work stages a queer body speaking in tongues without faith: a language remembered by the body, emptied of doctrinal certainty, and returned as performance, parody, residue, and address.
Originally captured as 45 minutes of continuous glossolalia, the work splits the performing subject into three figures — Father? Son? Holy Ghost? — producing a divided subject whose speech sounds linguistic but resists semantic translation. In its 2023 presentation, this division operates not only as a theological disturbance, but as a queer re-entry into a language-world where the strange body finds itself estranged.
Documentation
Installation documentation/exhibition documentation from Braving Time.
Research Relation
Within Meeting the Text Halfway, the 2023 presentation of We Can All Speak in Tongues demonstrates how a work changes when it is recontextualised by exhibition, audience, and institutional frame. In Braving Time, the work’s glossolalia is no longer only a private return to Pentecostal memory, but part of a broader field of contemporary queer practice.
The work was shown alongside artists including Tony Albert, Brook Andrew, Liam Benson, Vivienne Binns, Leigh Bowery, Gary Carsley, Michelle Collocott, Peter Cooley, Christine Dean, Karla Dickens, Todd Fuller, Amos Gebhardt, Tina Havelock Stevens, Brenton Heath-Kerr, Kate Just, Deborah Kelly, MO’JU, Clinton Naina, Nell, Claudia Nicholson, Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran, Emily Parsons-Lord, Troye Sivan, Ali Tahayori, Salote Tawale, Renjie Teoh, Athena Thebus, Dr Christian Thompson AO, Tim Silver, Matthew van Roden, and William Yang.
In this context, the work’s concern with tongues, spirit, hysteria, scripture, and address sits within a larger constellation of queer histories, bodies, performances, and temporalities. Its incoherence becomes not a failure of language, but a way of exposing language at its limit: a body speaking from the afterlife of belief.
QR Relation
Section: Part II: Praxis
Chapter: WE CAN ALL SPEAK IN TONGUES / Impact
Page: 142
Return to the document: This page documents the 2023 presentation of We Can All Speak in Tongues in Braving Time: Contemporary Art in Queer Australia at the National Art School, Sydney, as part of Queer Contemporary and Sydney WorldPride 2023.