Artist: Hanne Lippard
Exhibition title: Pocket
Curated by: Harry Burke for The Printed Room
Venue: SALTS, Birsfelden, Switzerland
Date: April 23 – May 27, 2017
Photography: Gunnar Meier, all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and SALTS
Published anonymously in Geneva in 1764, Voltaire’s Dictionnaire philosophique portatif was perhaps the first pocket book of the Enlightenment. At a little over 300 pages it sought to economize the dominant encyclopedic form, for, its author claimed, “revolutionary material must be small enough for people to carry with them.”
The smartphone continues this project. Shaped not for the ear, but for more intimate spaces, it puts access to universal knowledge in the palm of one’s hand, condenses the library into one’s pocket. Like the Enlightenment, its claim to democracy and revolution is founded in brutal, colonial extraction—rearticulated in its dependence upon discriminatory financial and material economies. We plunder pockets of resources. We burn holes in our pockets.
Glass sheets made speakers with surface transducers. Money, many, moans. Hearing the devices hearing us. Screens spleen. Butts dial. Avant-garde or derrière? Take your hands out your pockets. Speak up, speak out. You can do a lot with your money: divest or die.
The Printed Room at SALTS is proud to present Pocket, a solo exhibition by Hanne Lippard.
Hanne Lippard (*1984 in Milton Keynes, GB, lives and works in Berlin) explores the voice as a medium. Her education in graphic design informs how language can be visually powerful; her texts are visual, rhythmic, and performative rather than purely informative, and her work is conveyed through a variety of disciplines, which include short films, sound pieces, installations and performance. She has performed and exhibited at KW, Berlin (2017); ars viva (2016); Index — The Swedish Contemporary Art Foundation, Stockholm (2016); AUTOOFICE, *KURATOR, Rapperswil, CH (2016); Fluidity, Kunstverein, Hamburg, DE (2016); Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst, Leipzig, DE (2016); 6th Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art, Moscow (2015); The Future of Memory, Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna (2015); Transmediale, Berlin (2015); Bielefelder Kunstverein, Bielefeld, DE (2015); Unge Kunstneres Samfund, Oslo (2014); Berliner Festspiele, Berlin (2013); Poesía en Voz, Mexico City (2012).
