Is language large enough?

Each year Artspace Aotearoa sets one question which our exhibitions and events orbit in the company of artists and audiences. Across the year, we explore what this question offers us and what artworks and their authors can weave together. In 2025, we ask “is language large enough?”

In Lubaina Himid’s 2022 drawing made directly onto the wall of London’s Tate Modern she asks, but also states: “we live in clothes, we live in buildings – do they fit us?” When I encountered this prompt, it turned my attention to the essential infrastructures of daily life: places in which we shelter and what covers our bodies. It struck me how each part of this prompt straddles the technical and the erotic frameworks for forming our world. In asking her question, Himid draws a diagram arcing the zones of the technical and the erotic, subsequently highlighting the friction existing between them. This same friction is activated when language shuttles between the organisation of bodies, space, and culture as a crucial instrument in shaping and scaling our lived experiences. In asking this necessary question “is language large enough?” Artspace Aotearoa invites its audiences to consider contemporary society—from the public to the private, the artistic to the bureaucratic—and language’s charged role in defining these domains.

Language—whether written, aural, somatic, or otherwise—is not a fixed object but is highly unpredictable, fluid, and consequently evolving. Despite this fluidity it can be wielded to establish and entrench what Audre Lorde has described as the “mythical norm". 1 In this scenario, a certain type of subjecthood is established as standard and subsequently prioritised, often at the cost of another kind of subjecthood. If territory is the outline that defines the differentiated but interconnected zones of life (the public, private, artistic, and bureaucratic), then language forms or flattens the contours of these zones as it determines possible ways of relating. In other words, through repetitive use, language constitutes individual subjects by providing frameworks for sets of behaviours that are normalised. This becomes a feedback loop: we relate to one another through and within the languages we have received or accessed. The often invisible impact of contextual access also describes the limit of language.

While this analysis might sound discouraging, encountering the limit of language and its capacity to capture the wholeness of life may propel precedent-setting opportunities. The limit then acts as the enabling context where the capacity for language to become a vital force in any process of transformation is underscored, whether at the scale of the individual, organisation, or community.

In his article “Rethinking Free Speech” Moana Jackson describes spoken language on the marae where two forces are activated: the force of the atua Rongo (deity associated with peace) and the force of the atua Tūmatauenga (deity associated with war). Each atua plays a specific role in establishing points of contact between speakers which cover the gamut of expressive capacity, from confrontation to reflection to nourishment. Jackson states: “In that situation, both the right to speak freely and the exercise of the right itself are ideals to be protected because the marae exists to nurture relationships.”

Drawing from Jackson’s description of marae oration that requires relationships to be at the foreground and the establishing of a specific argument in the background, this year’s programme considers relating in the capacity of being in relation with one another and with the world. “Is language large enough?” therefore also asks how to construct a condition for life flexible enough to contain the span of the technical to the erotic? How can a condition for life be built that deviates from the entrenched “mythical norm” that Lorde so starkly warns us of? What languages are required to conjure deviations from the standards of form, of thought, of body, of desire?

Tenuous political, social, economic, and environmental terrains might adrenalise our current moment but they also expose the hegemonies allowing these conditions to develop at alarming rate and scale. Artworks and their makers, however, wield scale with other tempos in play: the intimate, the critical, the imaginary. Rather than exploding at exponential pace, these tempos enable the emergence of a beat that is varied and compensatory. Across 2025, the programme at Artspace Aotearoa activates artwork and artistic positions from multiple contexts, diverse mediums, and between generations to consider the potential of forging an otherwise, a deviation—however provisional—through the potency of communicating in the language of contemporary art.

Ruth Buchanan, January 2025

1. Audre Lorde. “Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference”, Your Silence Will Not Protect You. (London: Silver Press, 2017), pg 96.

2. Audre Lorde expands: “In America, this norm is usually defined as white, thin, male, young, heterosexual, Christian and financially secure. It is within this mythical norm that the trappings of power reside within this society.”