Words Unsaid: Autobiography and Knowing

Aylin Abbasi, Moving Rock, 2022, Single channel video (still)

Words Unsaid: Autobiography and Knowing

Featuring work by Aylin Abbasi, John Hanning, Neeko Paluzzi, Cara Tierney, and Sarah Tompkins
Curated by Adam Barbu, Guest Scholar-in-Residence

On View: March 30 – April 3, 2023
Curator’s Talk: March 31, 11:30 AM

University of Ottawa, Visual Arts Building
Gallery 219
100 Laurier Avenue East

Marking the culmination of Adam Barbu’s curatorial research residency at the Department of Visual Arts, Words Unsaid: Autobiography and Knowing interrogates the limits of self-knowledge through considerations of silence and speech. Drawing upon the work of five local and international artists, the project explores what is at stake when we slip from the discourse of knowing and rethink our attachments to a felt sense of certainty about ourselves, about the world.

Collectively, the artists and curator pose the question: What does it mean to say nothing as a form of something? In Words Unsaid, the notion of silent speech is expressed as the point of entry into a space where meaning unravels, where sense disconnects from sense, where the truth of the subject is obscured and identity is irreparably slant.

During the Curator’s Talk, Barbu will reflect on their project by reading curating as a queer dialogical practice. Thinking beyond the learned conventions of critical distance, they will frame the group exhibition as a shared work of art.

Admission is free. For more information, please contact:

Adam Barbu
Guest Scholar-in-Residence, University of Ottawa, Department of Visual Arts
abarb056@uottawa.ca

Department Website: uottawa.ca/faculty-arts/visual-arts
Department Instagram: @visualartsuottawa