Erik Bünger
Thou Shalt Not Speak
— Presentation
Saturday, 26 Sept 15:00 / MX
What is the relationship between voice-over and image? Does a voice-over give voice to an image, helping it communicate something it cannot communicate on its own — or does it do the opposite?
Thou Shalt Not Speak is an artistic research project by Erik Bünger that turns the familiar device of the voice-over into a question of power. Here, voice-over means more than an off-screen narrator: it describes a situation in which a single voice directs what an audience sees, how it interprets an image, and potentially how it understands the world beyond it.
Bünger starts from a paradox. Images are often assumed to communicate a kind of truth precisely because they do not speak. But when a voice begins to explain an image, speaking for it and determining what it means, what happens to everything in the image that escapes those words? Can its imposed silence become a way of resisting the voice that tries to contain it?
Developed through video works, lecture performances and collaborative research, Thou Shalt Not Speak moves between animal, image and voice, using the mechanics of voice-over against themselves. At SIMULTAN, Bünger presents the research and artistic works that have emerged from this investigation, asking a larger question: how much of what we see has already been spoken for?
Erik Bünger is an artist, writer and composer whose work presents a continuous investigation into the human voice and its uncertain position at the intersection of language and body. His performances, videos and compositions have been presented at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, The Wellcome Collection in London, The Lincoln Center in New York, KW in Berlin, ACCA in Melbourne, The Curitiba Biennial in Brazil and the Art Encounters Biennial in Timișoara. In 2022, he curated the Impakt Festival in Utrecht together with Florian Wüst. He currently holds a four-year research fellowship at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna, where he leads a group of artists in an investigation of the concept of “voice-over”.