Unbidden Tongues #8: Feelers brings together three photographic series by artist and activist Alexis Hunter. In a storyboard-like fashion, her ‘photo narrative sequences’ forensically detail her manhandling of artefacts of patriarchal oppression through the caressing touch of an array of characters: the Marxist wife, an interventionist secretary and a manicured mechanic. Born in New Zealand, Hunter moved to the United Kingdom in 1972 where, at the age of twenty-four, she joined the Women’s Workshop of the Artists Union and invested devotedly in feminist organising alongside her artistic practice.

Unbidden Tongues #7: Continuity Girl unpacks the ‘forensic feminist methodology’ developed by writer, curator and administrator Naomi Pearce. Informed by research conducted in various personal archives of women administrators of artist studio spaces in London from the 1970s until now, the components of Pearce’s writing span mortuary field notes, interview transcripts, intimate first-person accounts and an auto-fictive mystery novella. These various evidentiary approaches blend to form an unconventional casebook that puts forward the complicating factors underpinning the process of writing history in the first place. In this particular title, the biographical lens focuses on Shirley Read—a photographer, writer, teacher, administrator and oral historian, whose work has been largely overlooked, until now.

Unbidden Tongues #3.1: Adrian Piper is a poster to accompany Unbidden Tongues #3: Adrian Piper: Necessary Questions. This poster, housed in the archive of Kunstverein München and announcing Piper’s exhibition there in 1992, was reprinted in February 2022 on the occasion of Unbidden Tongues’ participation in On and Off the Grid, a yearly program of presentations and events dedicated to various form(at)s of publishing at the Schaufenster am Hofgarten, Kunstverein München.

More information on the original exhibition can be found here.

Produced on the occasion of the event Unbidden Tongues #6: Cutting Out Reading the New York Times, Saturday, 9 April from 4–6pm. The event unfolded over a newly conceived spoken-word version of Lorraine O’Grady’s collage series Cutting Out the New York Times. The initial work consists of 26 “cut-out” or “found” newspaper poems that O’Grady made on consecutive Sundays from June to November in 1977.

It is the sixth title from Unbidden Tongues, a series edited by Isabelle Sully that focuses on previously produced yet relatively uncirculated work by cultural practitioners busy with questions surrounding civility and civic life—particularly so in relation to language.

Produced on the occasion of the exhibition Unbidden Tongues #5: Theresa Hak Kyung Cha: Between the Teeth at Manifold Books, Amsterdam, 28 November, 2021–22 January, 2022.

​Drawing on artist, poet and filmmaker Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s extensive and largely unexhibited archive of ‘work on paper’, Unbidden Tongues #5: Between the Teeth is a publication-turned-exhibition and the fifth title in the series. From never-realised film scripts to concrete poetry and artists statements written intimately in the first person, the collection of material selected for this occasion presents the varying ways with which Cha drew on her personal and familial experience as an immigrant to conceptually grapple with language and its mediation and suppression, particularly, in this case, in its written form.

More information on the exhibition can be found here.

Unbidden Tongues #4: Oral Informants draws on the work of Australia social historian Janet McCalman who, in 1998, published a comprehensive history of the Melbourne Women’s Hospital. Written through the medical records of the women who were at one time or another the hospital’s temporary residents, McCalman’s account draws on a vast archive of 14,000 gynaecology records and over 70,000 midwifery records to build the hospital’s history through the administrative documents that litter its archive. Composed of an article written by McCalman in 1999 as well as a case file of original nursing notes, Oral Informants presents the process of penning a (medical) history lesson uniquely based in the oral testimony of women.