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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 a group exhibition that inhabits the space of language and song as oral, embodied, (post)colonial, diasporic, and Indigenous realities. Featuring ten international artists’ engagements with speech, music, and the transgenerational legacies of language, it encompasses video works, drawings, prints, mixed media, installation, and sculpture to create a sonorous and historically inflected linguistic landscape.

One language dies every day, globally, and nearly half of the roughly 7,000 languages spoken on Earth are expected to disappear within 70 years. This exhibition invokes the loss, silencing, and disappearance of languages, past and present, through (settler) colonialism, immigration, displacement, and genocide. It foregrounds the resonance of oral and aural knowledge and embraces the revitalization and resilience of Indigenous languages.

The exhibition title draws on Irish author Doireann Ní Ghríofa’s memoir, Ghost in the Throat. Lucy Cotter/Laoiseach Ní Choitir has curated the exhibition in parallel with writing 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.

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?