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Curating

Ghosts in the Throat: Language, Song, Orality, and Resilience

Oregon Center for Contemporary Art, Portland, OR
29 June–05 October

2025

  • Close up image of a Hong Kong based choir, singing together. They are dressed in black and holding black-covered songbooks.

    Samson Young, Muted Situation #5: Muted Chorus, 2014, instruction score, video. Production documentation. © Samson Young. Image courtesy the artist. Photo Credit: Dennis Man Wing Leung.

Ghosts in the Throat: Language, Song, Orality, and Resilience is an exhibition of works by ten international artists that inhabit the space of language and song as oral, embodied, (post)colonial, diasporic, and Indigenous realities. Working in video, sculpture, installation, and drawing, they invoke the loss, silencing, and disappearance of languages, past and present, through (settler) colonialism, immigration, displacement, and genocide, while foregrounding the resonance of oral and aural knowledge, and embracing the revitalization and resilience of Indigenous languages in the present. 

One language dies every day, globally, and 90% of the roughly 7,000 languages spoken on Earth are endangered, with half expected to disappear within 70 years. Several works in the exhibition invoke this silencing, suppression, and disappearance of languages, and the absences and gaps they leave in people’s lives and sense of self. Clarissa Tossin’s installation Before the Volcanoes Sing engages the legacy of Mayan cultures through poetry and song and a set of long-silent flutes. Min Oh’s video work flips the script by muting Western cultural expression, while Samson Young creates a ghostly choral presence.

Ghosts in the Throat embraces orality as a cultural form that holds open the space between speech and song, nourishing the relationship between language and land. Sculpture, video, and a drawing/score by Kite revolve around visions, dreams, and the Lakota (Lakȟótiyapi) language across generations. Sky Hopinka’s films use experimental means to explore the relationship between land and song, and complicate notions of history, and identity that sustain the Chinuk Wawa language. Collectively, they suggest the rhythm of place, and the internal rhythms of cultures at large, where a drumbeat is often one remove from the beating heart.

Engaging with speech, music, and the transgenerational legacies of language, the artists on show create a sonorous, disabling, resistant, and potent linguistic landscape. Patricia Vázquez Gómez’s drawings invoke the labor and repetitions of language re-acquisition. Ana Hernandez’s mixed media paintings draw on absences in the American Standard Code for Information Interchange to create her own coded vocabulary. Steffani Jemison’s Sensus Plenior studies embodied language and gesture through pantomime in the Black church, a form of spiritual expression stretching back centuries in the US and Africa. Pelenakeke Brown’s prints reclaim the choreography of the keyboard through Samoan tatau. JJJJJerome Ellis’s video-performance offers a healing and fugitive speech-song.

The exhibition’s title draws on Irish author Doireann Ní Ghríofa’s memoir, Ghost in the Throat. Itis curated by Lucy Cotter/Laoiseach Ní Choitir in parallel with the writing of her hybrid memoir-in-progress, Between Language – A Love Song.

Participating Artists: Pelenakeke Brown, JJJJJerome Ellis, Patricia Vázquez Gómez, Ana Hernandez, Sky Hopinka, Steffani Jemison, Kite, Min Oh, Clarissa Tossin, Samson Young. 

Update May 31 2025. Please note: This exhibition is currently postponed due to institutional constraints.

BIOGRAPHIES:

Pelenakeke Brown (Gataivai, Siutu-Salailua) is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice explores the intersections between disability theory and Sāmoan concepts. Her practice spans visual art, text, and performance. She is from Aotearoa (New Zealand) and is an Sāmoan/Pakehā, crip artist. She has worked internationally presenting performances, exhibitions, published writing and residencies in New York, California, Berlin, Hamburg, London and Aotearoa. She has worked with The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gibney Dance Center, The New York Library for the Performing Arts and other institutions globally. Selected residencies include Eyebeam, The Laundromat Project, and Denniston Hill. Her work has been written about in Art in America, The New York Times, Art Agenda and The Art Paper. In 2020 she was recognised with a Creative New Zealand Pacific Toa award. She is informed by the Samoan concept of the vā- relationships across time and space, crip time and is continually trying to find sites to investigate that hold both of these dual theories. Pelenakeke’s work straddles many mediums, is it a poem, a visual work or a choreographic score- she asks, why not all three?

JJJJJerome Ellis (any pronoun) is a disabled Grenadian-Jamaican-American artist, surfer, and person who stutters. The artist works across music, performance, writing, video, and photography. Concepts that organize the artist’s practice include: unknowing, improvisation, fugitivity, illegibility, inheritance, opacity, prayer, gap, contradiction, aporia, eternity, unpredictability, interruption, and silence. Ellis researches relationships among blackness, disabled speech, divinity, nature, sound, and time. The artist’s body of work includes: contemplative soundscapes using saxophone, flute, dulcimer, electronics, and vocals; scores for plays and podcasts; albums combining spoken word with ambient and jazz textures; theatrical explorations involving live music and storytelling; and music-video-poems that seek to transfigure archival documents. Their debut album, The Clearing (2021) won the 2022 Anna Rabinowitz Prize.JJJJJerome’s work has recently been presented by the Whitney Museum and National Sawdust (New York); Venice Biennale 2023; Haus der Kunst (Munich); Rewire Festival (The Hague); Schauspielhaus Zürich; Chrysler Hall (Norfolk, Virginia); MASS MoCA (North Adams, Massachusetts); the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania); and Oklahoma Contemporary (Oklahoma City). They have received commissions from the Virginia Symphony Orchestra, The Shed, and REDCAT. JJJJJerome has the great privilege of being married to poet-ecologist Luísa Black Ellis. They live in a monastery on a creek in traditional Nansemond and Chesepioc territory, aka Norfolk, VA.

Patricia Vázquez Gómez (she/her) lives and works between the ancient Tenochtitlán and the unceded and occupied lands of the Chinook, Clackamas, Multnomah and other Indigenous peoples. Her art practice investigates the social functions of art, the intersections between aesthetics, ethics and politics and the expansion of community based art practices. She uses a variety of media to carry out her research: painting, printmaking, video, exhibitions, music and multidisciplinary projects. The purposes and methodologies of her work are deeply informed by her experiences working in the immigrant rights and other social justice movements. Her work has been shown at the Portland Art Museum, the Reece Museum, the Paragon Gallery, and the Houston Art League, but also in other spaces as apartments complexes, community based organizations and schools. She is the recipient of the 2013 Arlene Schnitzer Visual Arts Prize and has received support from the Ford Foundation, Regional Arts and Culture Council (RACC), the Portland Institute of Contemporary Art (PICA), the Oregon Community Foundation and Oregon Humanities. Patricia teaches at the undergraduate and graduate levels at Portland State University.

Ana Hernandez is an Oregon-born artist currently living and working in Bulbancha, also known as New Orleans, Louisiana.  By calling attention to boundaries and barriers, both real and imagined, natural and built, social and political, and within public and private spaces–and through the reexamination of varying representations of time and place and its peoples and culture–she seeks to reveal the unseen, the unheard, the unspoken, the unknown, and the overlaying histories at these intersections. She is a co-founding member of Level Artist Collective and has been nominated for and awarded Artist Residencies by Joan Mitchell Foundation, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, and Contemporary Arts Center of New Orleans.  Her work has been exhibited locally at New Orleans Museum of Modern Art, Contemporary Arts Center of New Orleans, Ogden Museum of Southern Art, Xavier University, Newcomb Art Museum, A Studio in the Woods, Stella Jones Gallery, among others.  Her work has also been exhibited nationally in Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Kansas, Virginia, Illinois, New York, Mississippi, Michigan, and Minnesota; as well as internationally, to and from the Arctic and Antarctica.

Sky Hopinka (Ho-Chunk Nation/Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians) was born and raised in Ferndale, Washington and lives in New York. In Portland he studied and taught chinuk wawa, a language indigenous to the Lower Columbia River Basin. His video, photo, and text work centers around personal positions of Indigenous homeland and landscape, designs of language as containers of culture expressed through personal, documentary, and non fiction forms of media. His work has played at various festivals including Sundance, Toronto International Film Festival, Ann Arbor, Courtisane Festival, Punto de Vista, and the New York Film Festival. His work was a part of the 2017 Whitney Biennial, the 2018 FRONT Triennial and Prospect.5 in 2021. He was a guest curator at the 2019 Whitney Biennial and participated in Cosmopolis #2 at the Centre Pompidou. He has had a solo exhibition at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, in 2020 and in 2022 at LUMA in Arles, France.

Steffani Jemison is an interdisciplinary artist and writer in Brooklyn, New York whose work explores such questions as: How do we move? How are we moved by each other? In dialogue with interlocutors (living and ancestral), her work connects mark-making, gesture, proposal, projection, movement, and document. Jemison has presented solo exhibitions and commissioned performances at JOAN Los Angeles, Greene Naftali, Mass MoCA, Jeu de Paume, CAPC Bordeaux, the Museum of Modern Art, LAXART, and other venues. Her work has been included in significant generational exhibitions, including Greater New York 2021 and the Whitney Biennial 2019, and is part of many public collections, including the Hirschhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim Museum, the Whitney Museum, and the Art Institute of Chicago. Jemison’s novella A Rock, A River, A Street was published by Primary Information in 2022; she has also written for Artforum and The Brooklyn Rail. Her work is currently on view in permanent collection exhibitions at the Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam), the Albright-Knox (Buffalo), and the Albertinum Museum (Dresden) and in the touring exhibition A Movement in Every Direction: Legacies of the Great Migration. She is an Associate Professor at Rutgers University Mason Gross School of the Arts.

Kite is an Oglála Lakȟóta performance artist, visual artist, and composer (raised in Southern California, lives in New York). She has a BFA from CalArts in music composition, an MFA from Bard College and a PhD from Concordia University, Montreal. Kite’s scholarship and practice investigate contemporary Lakȟóta ontologies through research-creation, computational media, and performance. Recently, Kite has been developing a body interface for movement performances, carbon fiber sculptures, immersive video and sound installations, as well as co-running the experimental electronic imprint Unheard Records. Kite has also published in several journals and magazines, including The Journal of Design and Science (MIT Press), where the award-winning article “Making Kin with the Machines,” coauthored with Jason Lewis, Noelani Arista, and Archer Pechawis, was featured. Kite was a 2019 Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation Scholar, a 2020 Tulsa Artist Fellow, a 2020 Sundance Institute New Frontier Story Lab Fellow, a 2020 “100 Women in AI Ethics,” and a 2021 Common Field Fellow. Kite is a 2022–23 Creative Time Open Call artist for the Black and Indigenous Dreaming Workshops with Alisha B. Wormsley.

Min Oh (b. 1975, Korea, lives in Amsterdam) is an artist who explores the nature of time through experiments in various mediums such as music, sound, and performance. Oh expands the realm of the senses in her research of time. She studies the temporality, movement, and characteristics of light in performance and visual arts, delving into physical considerations affecting gaps in time and paradoxical contradictions that range from the perfect to the imperfect. She has held solo exhibitions at Platform-L Contemporary Art Center (2020) and Atelier Hermès (2018), and her works are housed in the Seoul Museum of Art, National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art and SongEun Foundation.

Clarissa Tossin’s (born 1973, Porto Alegre, Brazil, based in Los Angeles) collaborative, research-based practice develops alternative narratives found in the built environment, using elements of installation, sculpture, and moving image to explore intersections of place, history, and aesthetics. Employing moving images, installation, and sculpture, she explores their alternative narratives in both built and natural environments of extractive economies. Whether reinserting figurative traditions and ritual practices of Mayan motifs in early twentieth-century Los Angeles architecture, as in her 2017 video Ch’u Mayaa, or more broadly examining a grotesque, postlapsarian world, the artist employs the future perfect language of speculative science to propose ways of seeing our devastated present. She has presented  solo exhibitions at  Museum of Contemporary Art Denver (2022); Moody Center for the Arts at Rice University, Houston (2021); La Kunsthalle Mulhouse, France (2021); Harvard Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Cambridge, MA (2019); and Blanton Museum of Art, Austin (2018). She is the recipient of a Graham Foundation Grant (2020); Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grant (2019); Fellows of Contemporary Art Grant (2019); Artadia Award (2018); and Juméx Foundation Research Grant (2018), among others.

Samson Young (b. 1979, Hong Kong) works in sound, performance, video, and installation. Solo projects include the De Appel, Amsterdam; Kunsthalle Düsseldorf; Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh; the Hong Kong Pavillion at the 57th Venice Biennale, Venice; SF MOMA, San Francisco; SMART Museum, Chicago; Centre for Contemporary Chinese Art, Manchester; Mori Art Museum, Tokyo; Ryosoku-in at Kenninji Temple, Kyoto; Monash University Museum of Art, Melbourne; and Jameel Art Centre, Dubai, among others. Selected group exhibitions include Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Gropius Bau, Berlin; Performa 19, New York; Biennale of Sydney; Shanghai Biennale; Sonic Acts Biennale, Amsterdam; National Museum of Art, Osaka; National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul; Ars Electronica, Linz; and documenta 14: documenta radio, among others. Samson Young holds a B.A. in music, philosophy and gender studies from the University Sydney, an M.Phil. in music composition from the University of Hong Kong, and a Ph.D. in music composition from Princeton University. He was the founder of sound art & experimental music group CMHK, and a member of the Tomato Grey artist collective.

Curating

Lucy Cotter holds a PhD in cultural analysis, engaging with the agency of curating in a post/colonial world. In her writing and curatorial projects, she approaches the exhibition space as a unique site for embodied-material-spatial knowledge-making, multi-sensory access, and cultural decolonization.

Her curatorial accolades include being the curator of the Dutch Pavilion, 57th Venice Biennale 2017, with Cinema Olanda: Wendelien Van Oldenborgh, a solo exhibition in Venice comprising of an architectonic installation with new film works, engaging with tensions between the national image and suppressed histories. Cinema Olanda: Platform, a major group exhibition and event program at Kunstinstitut Melly, the Stedelijk Museum, and EYE Film Museum which brought these questions home to the Netherlands.

Cotter was Curator in Residence at Oregon Contemporary, Portland, OR from 2021–22, curating the year-long program Turnstones (2022-3). Other recent presentations include Undoing Langauge: Early Performance by Brian O' Doherty at The Kitchen, New York (2021), and The Unknown Artist (2019) at the Center for Contemporary Art and Culture, Portland. She is currently curating the year-long program Artistic Research in a World on Fire (2024–5) as project resident at Stelo Arts and Culture Foundation, Portland, with additional events at venues across the US, including e-flux, New York; The Henry Art Gallery, Seattle, and Rivers Institute for Contemporary Art and Thought, New Orleans.

Her earlier projects include being co-curator of Here as the Centre of the World, 2006–2008, a transnational artistic research project in six cities worldwide that explored possibilities for a more culturally responsive art discourse. She organized numerous exhibitions engaging with artistic research as head of the MA Artistic Research, Royal Academy of Art, The Hague from 2010-2015. Cotter has worked in various capacities at museums and galleries in Germany (Ludwigs Forum for Contemporary Art) and Italy (Peggy Guggenheim Museum and Nuova Icona Institute) and from 2003-4 was co-director of Public Space With A Roof, Amsterdam.

Curatorial, Selected

SAMPLE CATALOGUES

How close is curatorial practice to the affinities and sensibilities of artists? Does curating seek to hold knowledge differently; does it work from art’s embodied material-conceptual processes? Does it swim in the direction of the unknown? Is it committed to fluidity, to play, and to serious reimagining? What are the continuities and discontinuities between artistic practice, academic inquiry, and curatorial practice? Does it embrace the exhibition’s potential to hold space for (neurodiverse, anti-ableist, anti-racist, gender-exploratory) forms of intelligence?