Liquid Tongues is a collaboration between two artists and a community choir of deaf and hearing people. Despite drawing on many ideas, the film lands a generic, corporate look. Were Burska and Kotowski not aware of the rich history of linguistic experiment (in the Biennale’s last edition, for example) or social practice (Althamer’s Nowolipie) in Polish art?
Anyone could have made this as a commercial music video years ago. And they wouldn’t today: inclusion aesthetics is absent in the Biennale elsewhere. The artists bring little new to the table and thus resort to a gratuitous hype and installation gimmicks. But forcing audiences to recline to see a screen it does not make up for its inconsequential content.
