Liquid Tongues

Liquid Tongues is an audio-video installation in which Bogna Burska and Daniel Kotowski seek alternative ways of communicating inspired by more-than-human life. The social Choir in Motion (Chór w Ruchu), made up of hearing and Deaf people, perform interpretations of the communication codes and songs of whales, simultaneously in English phonic and international sign (IS) languages, building visual-spatial-sonic fantasias on the theme of possible translations. The installation operates on multiple levels: image (cinematography by Magda Mosiewicz), movement (choreography by Alicja Czyczel), sound (music composed by Aleksandra Gryka), and the physical experience of acoustic waves.

The project was inspired by Roger Payne’s legendary recordings, Songs of the Humpback Whale (1970), which led to a ban on whale hunting and saved them from extinction. The complex sounds of these songs reminded the world of the intelligence and richness of animal culture, showing art could save voices that were once inaudible.

Liquid Tongues is a tale of loss, but also of the reconstruction of cultures and modern-day work to retrieve languages marginalised by the dominant narratives. It is a story of Payne’s work and the significance of his recordings. It recounts new and unknown (or perhaps old and reborn) collections of hundreds of generally solitary humpbacks on the west coast of Africa. It involves works created on the qilaat – a ritual drum used by the natives of Greenland, although no one knows how it sounded prior to the island’s brutal colonisation. As well as work on restoring Hand Talk – Plains Indian Sign Language – the universal sign language of hearing and Deaf native inhabitants of the Great Plains of North America. It is a tale about breaking with the oppression of phonetic training and building Deaf subjecthood. It is the recurring feminist figure of the whalerider, inspired by the New Zealand myth. The stories evoked here allow us to imagine, in spite of everything, alternatives for the world – opportunities to rebuild what has collapsed or been destroyed by the dominant voices. We might join Sabrina Imbler in asking: ‘How shall you regrow, and in how many ways?’

According to the idea of Deaf Gain, deafness is understood not as a disability, but as a separate culture and identity offering new perspectives and forms of expression. Much of the material has been gathered in the water, an environment where Deaf people can communicate freely in sign language, while hearing people can only produce warped sounds. The line between air and water is a space for communication experiments, a mirror of sorts where various languages, bodies and sensibilities meet.

In the curatorial concept for Biennale 2026, based on the musical metaphor of a ‘minor key’, Koyo Kouoh extends an invitation to contemplatively encounter what is delicate and generally overlooked – softer voices, neglected narratives, micro-memories. She encourages us to develop subtle forms of resistance, sensitive experiments, to build polyphonic scores of mutually resonating societies. The Liquid Tongues installation explores this idea, attempting to break through what we imagine to be the limits of communication and to create subjective communities, taking various perspectives into account. In a projected version of the future – including animal perspectives.