Silent Talking – A Dialogue of Absence
In Silent Talking , the act of communication becomes a haunting spectacle of unspoken words. The work confronts the viewer with an intimate yet impenetrable encounter: a woman’s face emerges from darkness, her features sculpted by a single shaft of lateral light that casts her into stark relief. Her lips move slowly, forming silent utterances—whispers of urgency that dissolve into the void. Her hands trace deliberate, almost ceremonial motions, their gestures suspended between plea and surrender. The shallow depth of field flattens the space, reducing the world to a chiaroscuro of flesh and shadow, where every flicker of expression is magnified into a cipher of longing, despair, or defiance.
Projected onto a monumental black screen in low-resolution SD (4:3 DV PAL), the piece evokes the grainy intimacy of early video art, its retro aesthetic amplifying the dissonance between proximity and distance. For ten relentless minutes, the viewer is held captive by the woman’s silence—a silence that swells into a visceral absence. There is no soundtrack, no voice to anchor meaning, only the audience’s own breath and murmurs reverberating as spectral accompaniment. In this void, spectators become unwitting participants, their attempts to “hear” her words transforming into a collective act of projection, frustration, and self-reflection.
At its core, Silent Talking is a meditation on erasure. The woman’s muteness is not merely physical but symbolic, a mirror to societal mechanisms that render women’s voices imperceptible—whether through censorship, indifference, or the noise of patriarchal structures. The interplay of light and gesture becomes a language of negation: illumination reveals, yet the absence of sound obliterates. What remains is the tension between presence and erasure, between the body’s capacity to speak and the systems that silence it.
The choice of DV technology and low resolution projection further underscores this duality. The grainy texture, the flickering imperfections of the medium, evoke both vulnerability and resistance—a tactile reminder of the fragility of recorded memory and the bodies it archives. Shot in Brussels in 2004, the work resonates beyond its immediate context, tapping into a universal disquiet about communication’s failures and the violence of unlistened-to cries.
Silent Talking does not offer resolution. Instead, it lingers as an unresolved chord, a provocation to confront the spaces where speech is stifled, where agency is muted, and where the desire to “hear” becomes its own desperate performance. In its refusal to yield a voice, it compels the viewer to ask: Who gets to speak? Who is heard? And what vanishes in the silence between us?