Registration for Talk

On Language and Art

27^th Jul, Monday, 7:00-9:00pm

Free Entry. Online registration is required.

• 429
• Venue:agnès b. cinema, Hong Kong Arts Centre, 2 Harbour Road, Wanchai, Hong Kong
• Speakers: Adam Jaworski, Professor, School of English, The University of Hong Kong
• View biography
• Moderator: Tina Pang, M+ Curator, Hong Kong Visual Culture
• Language: English, with Cantonese simultaneous interpretation

Modern and contemporary art has been a site of intense linguistic production for over a century. Visual artists’ experiments with language have developed new ways of seeing it as a material resource, subject to transformative processes of creativity and symbolic manipulation that, at times, contravene or subvert dominant language ideologies – our received beliefs of what language ‘is’ or what it should be ‘like’. In this talk, Professor Jaworski will trace some developments of language use in Dada, Surrealism, Pop Art, Conceptualism, Performance Art and other text-based artists including Tsang Kin-Wah, in order to examine the meaning potential of language in art through the affordances of its design, scale, materiality, emplacement, animation and other formal features. Artists’ linguistic ideologies emerging from these performative uses of language will be put into dialogue with current sociolinguistic work on globalisation, commodification and creativity.