Having something to say, yet uncertain whether one has the right to speak because of

who one is. This is the condition the exhibition takes as its starting point.

We call it in-betweenness. But the exhibition is not centred on the concept itself. What

concerns it is the more specific condition it produces: silence. Not quietness, shyness,

or reticence, but a more complex state that emerges when identity frames speech

before it can be heard, and when speaking may no longer mean speaking as oneself.

From this point, silence becomes a way of rethinking sound art. Sound art need not be

understood only as works that use sound as material. If silence is taken seriously, other

questions emerge: do those things that cannot be fully articulated still constitute a

sonic experience? What is delayed, suppressed, obscured, or untranslatable, does it

still belong to sound? Silence here is not the opposite of voice, but an unfinished, still-

present state of it.

Within the exhibition, this silence appears through different registers: bodily

obstruction, the overwriting of individual voice, the erasure of collective language, the

instability of the speaking subject, and finally what remains when speech has never fully

arrived.

In the Church of the Light, these registers of silence are articulated through

architecture. Its cross is an excision rather than an addition, making light present

through absence. Closed indefinitely since 2023, the church becomes a fitting spatial

echo of the exhibition’s central proposition: voice depends on the conditions that allow

it to appear.

The confessional holds both speaking and not speaking as valid responses. Silence

here is not failure, but a form of response the exhibition is willing to hold.