Nicoline van Harskamp

Nicoline van Harskamp is an artist based in the Netherlands whose work considers acts of language and solidarity. She is the Professor for Performative Art at the University of Fine Arts in Münster, Germany.

Her work has been exhibited internationally, including at the Edith Russ Haus in Oldenburg, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, the Ellen Art Gallery in Montréal, the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin, BAK in Utrecht, Manifesta 9 in Genk, and the Biennials of Gothenburg, Sydney, Taipei, Moscow and Budapest. 

Her live works have been staged, among other places, at the M HKA Antwerp, Urbane Künste Ruhr in Oberhausen, Steirischer Herbst in Graz, Project Art Centre in Dublin, Tate Modern in London, KunstWerke in Berlin, New Museum in New York, Arnolfini in Bristol, Serralves Foundation in Porto, and the Kaaitheater in Brussels. 

Since its launch in 2019, Van Harskamp’s project Englishes Mooc, a Massive Open Online Course aimed at anybody who uses English for artistic purposes, hundreds of people globally have enrolled for a six-week cycle.

Contagious Speech

Contagious Speech is a video installation about the altered roles of proximity and virtuality in spoken exchange, and the possible effects of this on language variety and language dominance. The coronavirus pandemic, with its sudden transition from ‘contaminating’ face-to-face speech, to streamed online speech, seems to have sped up this process.

Do some words or languages produce more droplets with possible contaminating virus particles than others? What effects does talking to a screen have on our voices? Are we the owner of our voices when we’re online? Why don’t automated voices breathe? Contagious Speech is comprised of a video essay based on interviews with, among others, Natural Language Processing experts, speech therapists, voice-over artists, an ICU medic, a gospel singer and a beat-box artist.

While jumping from subject to subject, one continuous track of breath moves through the work. This ‘breath track’ is visualised in the space, and visitors are invited to train their own diaphragm while watching.

Following its showing at TULCA, Continuous Speech will continue to exist online, as part of Nicoline’s solo exhibition at Galerie UQO in Canada. On the site www.contagious-speech.org, from November 23rd, visitors can find a questionnaire about language prejudices (old ones and new ones that have emerged throughout the covid pandemic); a conversation between generations of makers of online performance (also known as cyber performance, networked performance, digital theatre or zoom performance, depending on the era); and an instruction video for the breath track. This project is supported by the Mondriaan Foundation.

Image: Nicoline van Harskamp, Contagious Speech, 2022, video still.