Shtager&Shch Gallery

The Middle Voice: Caroline Achaintre, Anna Higgins, Niamh O’Malley, Aimée Parrott, Stephen Polatch. Curated by Maria Hinel

On view from 30th April until 15th June

The exhibition takes its title from a term in grammar which exists beyond a familiar distinction between the active and passive voices. Although the middle voice is not formally marked in English (as it is in classical Greek and Sanskrit) it is present in our language and allows us to map out a multi-specied agency, away from a human-centric assumption of mankind as ‘actors’ in an ‘inert’ natural environment. In verbs such as ‘observe’, ‘witness’ or ‘partake’, the middle voice suggests an efficacy that both receives and twists. That is, middle voice denotes actions where the subject is not anterior to the field of action, coming before it takes place, but rather interiorto it, inextricably part of the way in which it unfolds (another example in modern language is ‘je suis n’, ‘I am born’). Distinct from an inherent hierarchy between an ‘agent’ and ‘patient’ characteristic of active and passive voices, middle-voiced expression thus acknowledges the profound entanglement of human and non-human, the simultaneity of acting and being acted upon in the world.

Bringing together works by Caroline Achaintre, Anna Higgins, Niamh O’Malley, Aimée Parrott, Stephen Polatch, the exhibition explores the possibility of expressing a middle-voiced view in visual terms – locating the ineffable sense of push/pull with the external world, felt in materials, mark-making process, or in the presence of the work in space.