Iris [A Fragment]
2018–19
Two-screen (synchronised) video installation, 14”30, colour, stereo sound
English, Swedish and Arabic spoken
Courtesy of the artist, Matts Gallery London and AKINCI, Amsterdam
Iris [A fragment] focuses on the Swedish therapist and writer Iris Johansson. Johansson was non-verbal until she learned to speak at the age of 12, but as she says, “I will always be autistic”, and part of her will always be non-verbal. In her pre-verbal years, Johansson was much of the time in a mind-out-of-body space she calls the “Real reality” or “Out”. Her father—and later, Johansson herself—worked hard to connect her with the “ordinary reality”. At the age of around twelve she started to train herself to behave in conventional ways, studying people around her and actors on the cinema screen, practicing their expressions and gestures for hours in front of her mirror at home. This training was not so much a limiting of her way of being, as a route to making possible the social contact she longed for. By learning “normal” behaviour, she no triggered the “fear mechanisms” in people around her. Iris [A fragment] comes out of Imogen Stidworthy’s long-term research into voicing “on the borders of language”—into how relationship and sense-making are affected, perhaps even changed, in the “rub-up” with different forms of voicing and modes of being. In her research Iris Johansson figures as a go-between between verbal and non-verbal being. This work was filmed in Dahab, South Sinai (Egypt), where Johansson lives and works for several months each year, and her home in Fagersta (Sweden). The two-screen installation focuses on a formative moment when, at the age of 10, Johansson’s father confronted her with her own reflection in the mirror.
Artist’s Bio:
Imogen Stidworthy investigates different forms of voicing in which words are not a given. What other forms of meaning emerge at the borders of language and how do they affect social relationships, senses of self, and the binary thinking that language holds in place? Her work involves communication in spaces between languages, whether shaped by cultural practices or conditions such as aphasia and non-verbal autism, and opens the way to new forms of social relationship. These voices engage us in different modes of listening and reflect our relationship with our own tongues in new and surprising ways.