Ghosts in the Throat: Language, Song, Orality, and Resilience

27 June - 5 October, 2025
Curated by Lucy Cotter (Laoiseach Ní Choitir)

Ghosts in the Throat: Language, Song, Orality, and Resilience is an exhibition of works by ten international artists that inhabit the space of language and song as oral, embodied, (post)colonial, diasporic, and Indigenous realities. Working in video, sculpture, installation, and drawing, they invoke the loss, silencing, and disappearance of languages, past and present, through (settler) colonialism, immigration, displacement, and genocide, while foregrounding the resonance of oral and aural knowledge, and embracing the revitalization and resilience of Indigenous languages in the present. 

One language dies every day, globally, and 90% of the roughly 7,000 languages spoken on Earth are endangered, with half expected to disappear within 70 years. Several works in the exhibition invoke this silencing, suppression, and disappearance of languages, and the absences and gaps they leave in people’s lives and sense of self. Clarissa Tossin’s installation Before the Volcanoes Sing engages the legacy of Mayan cultures through poetry and song and a set of long-silent flutes. Min Oh’s video work flips the script by muting Western cultural expression, while Samson Young creates a ghostly choral presence.

Ghosts in the Throat embraces orality as a cultural form that holds open the space between speech and song, nourishing the relationship between language and land. Sculpture, video, and a drawing/score by Kite revolve around visions, dreams, and the Lakota (Lakȟótiyapi) language across generations. Sky Hopinka’s films use experimental means to explore the relationship between land and song, and complicate notions of history, and identity that sustain the Chinuk Wawa language. Collectively, they suggest the rhythm of place, and the internal rhythms of cultures at large, where a drumbeat is often one remove from the beating heart.

Engaging with speech, music, and the transgenerational legacies of language, the artists on show create a sonorous, disabling, resistant, and potent linguistic landscape. Patricia Vázquez Gómez’s drawings invoke the labor and repetitions of language re-acquisition. Ana Hernandez’s mixed media paintings draw on absences in the American Standard Code for Information Interchange to create her own coded vocabulary. Steffani Jemison’s Sensus Plenior studies embodied language and gesture through pantomime in the Black church, a form of spiritual expression stretching back centuries in the US and Africa. Pelenakeke Brown’s prints reclaim the choreography of the keyboard through Samoan tatau. JJJJJerome Ellis’s video-performance offers a healing and fugitive speech-song.

The exhibition’s title draws on Irish author Doireann Ní Ghríofa’s memoir, Ghost in the Throat. Itis curated by Lucy Cotter/Laoiseach Ní Choitir in parallel with the writing of her hybrid memoir-in-progress, Between Language – A Love Song.

Participating Artists: Pelenakeke Brown, JJJJJerome Ellis, Patricia Vázquez Gómez, Ana Hernandez, Sky Hopinka, Steffani Jemison, Kite, Min Oh, Clarissa Tossin, Samson Young. 

Lucy Cotter (Laoiseach Ní Choitir) (she/her) works across a spectrum of practice and theory, often coming full circle through writing, making, curating, and educating. She embraces art's dynamic engagement with other fields, foregrounding how its multi-sensory nature creates possibilities to transform, queer, decolonize, re-indigenize, and de-ableize knowledge.

She holds a PhD in cultural analysis, engaging with the agency of curating in a post/colonial world. Her curatorial accolades include being the curator of the Dutch Pavilion, 57th Venice Biennale 2017, and co-curator of Here as the Centre of the World, a transnational project in six global cities. She has curated exhibitions, performance, and events internationally at venues including the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; EYE Film Museum, Amsterdam; Kunstinstitut Melly, Rotterdam; e-flux, New York; The Kitchen, New York; the Center for Contemporary Art and Culture, Portland, and Oregon Center for Contemporary Art, Portland; Rivers Institute for Contemporary Art and Thought, New Orleans, Et. al, San Francisco, and the Henry Art Gallery, Seattle.

Cotter has published over 100 texts on contemporary art, highlighting its entanglement in social, cultural, and political questions. She has also written about experimental and cross-genre practices in dance, theatre, architecture, sound, music, and design. Her work has been published in journals such as Frieze, Flash Art, Third Text, Artforum, Mousse, and Hyperallergic. Recent and upcoming book chapters appear in Estado Vegetal: Plant Thinking (University of Minnesota Press); The Edinburgh Companion to Curatorial Futures (University of Edinburgh Press), The Routledge Companion to Irish Art, and catalogues such as Haegue Yang: The Great Forgetfulness (National Sculpture Factory).

Oregon Contemporary is supported by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the James F. & Marion L. Miller Foundation, and The Ford Family Foundation. Oregon Contemporary also receives support from the the City of Portland and the Oregon Arts Commission, a state agency funded by the State of Oregon and the National Endowment for the Arts. Other businesses and individuals provide additional support.