KARLSRUHE.- In a digital context that seduces us into believing in seamless and instantaneous communication, the bodily friction in language becomes a form of interference that must be smoothed away. Systems such as automatic speech recognition are characterised by hegemonic notions about which voices and which linguistic forms are worth recognising.

Anna Barham (*1974, Sutton Coldfield)—who presents her first major solo exhibition in Germany at Badischer Kunstverein—resists this smoothening of language and instead pushes the untranslatable and the irreducible into sharp focus. Her practice links language with the visual and the performative, crystallising associative meanings that might be inherent in a word, yet emerge only through the displacement of its individual elements.

Barham treats language as both plastic and sonic material and the exhibition is filled with sounds and voices. Hands form and reform letters from geometric shapes; text snakes through the galleries, around and over the institutional architecture and its fittings; a large format UV printer generates words and images; and the incessant call of a cicada sounds from the furthest space.

Since 2013, Barham has worked with the error-prone nature of speech recognition, to produce new meanings, and to foreground the materiality of the voice and its disruptions. For the artist, it is precisely these textures and mishearings which hold the relational potential of the voice. In her new sound work, ZYX (2026) she considers the errors produced by automatic speech recognition as hallucinations.

What initially seems like a misheard text is in reality a new way of thinking and writing—in radical opposition to automatisation, standardisation and authority.

Curated by Anja Casser