Xenoglossia, the exhibition departs from Xenoglossia, a research project – a process initiated in 2010 by the Centre for Historical Reenactments (CHR ). The CHR research team comprising of artists, curators and writers worked for a period of more than a year at bringing forth existing historical and contemporary examples in which linguistic proximity and distance has informed attitudes to concepts of strangeness, sameness, difference and otherness.

Xenoglossia is an alleged, or rare condition of speaking or writing in a language entirely unknown to the speaker. The exhibition will thus pose questions regarding curatorial and artistic vocabularies manifested within an exhibition, the unknowing grammar of the exhibition. Work featured in the project will not be entering an empty room but a space already “accused” by questions posed. The exhibition attempts to give answers to questions staged throughout the research project in order to develop some of the ideas borne from it.

CHR is a Johannesburg-based alternative platform and a site for artistic and historical research. CHR is interested in creating dialogues between creative practices in order to reveal how within their constellations certain histories are formed or formulated, repeated, universalized and preserved.

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