Matthew Hindley’s Speak Naturally and Continuously… featured in Dada South?at the Iziko South African National Gallery.
Dada South? presents a collision of artistic strategies and forms that reflect the impact of the Dada movement, especially on South African art practice. The exhibition presents both original Dada artworks and works works conceived and enacted in the spirit of Dada, which seek to question the conventions, values and function of art in a troubled society.
Speak Naturally and Continuously… falls into Matthew Hindley’s interest in audience interaction with a constructed project environment. Selected as a finalist for the 2003 MTN New Contemporaries award and later taken in by the South African National Gallery as a permanent installation, the work’s content is collected via microphones planted at various points in the gallery. The sounds gathered, after being subjected to the processes of the project environment, are displayed on eight metres of LED screen running across the gallery’s entrance.
‘Sounds and voices will be picked up, transmitted and then converted by a text engine, and will finally scroll, as random commentary, across the LED display. The corruption of language and self-expression is guaranteed in this process. Cogent argument is useless, and all language will lose its hierarchy: shattered in collation, made equal in assimilation, and redeployed inevitably to be lost in translation’ (Tracy Murinik, 10 Years, 100 Artists, Bell-Roberts Publishing, 2004).