Curated by Jeannette Bisschops

Off Script brings together a group of artists whose works offer propositions to liberate signs, symbols and words from the conventions of traditional language and text. Including works by Art & Language, Joel Dean, Paige K.B., Anna K.E., Christine Sun Kim, Kang Seung Lee, and Sue Tompkins, Off Script revels in open-ended storytelling, uncovering new forms for vocabulary and dialogue. Destabilizing a fundamental linguistic hierarchy, the works break out of the constraints of straightforward meaning and interpretation and deflate ideas of truth and authorship.

Celebrating the messiness and sensuousness of communication, questioning the authoritarian effect of printed text, and exploring the opaque quality of unfamiliar or forgotten signs, the works in this exhibition tell tales that abandon and adhere to different carriers, spill in new structures and forms, and activate the bodily functions of communication. Where does language originate and leave our body? How does it find its receivers and where does it fail? Has the digital age abstracted our interactions by the use of complexity-reducing interfaces and scripts? Making use of linguistic and symbolic layering, blurring, and repetition, the works in this exhibition show how the use of ambiguity could expose the indefinite quality language inherently carries. Asking questions that do not need to be answered, these works deliberately extend a line of escape to a language that refuses to be easily processed and predicted.

– Jeanette Bisschops