The current Speech Acts exhibition in Gallery 12 places ‘collection highlights’ alongside lesser-known works from four public collections in Manchester and Bradford, allowing the viewer to make connections between them with “an invitation to […] consider how new meanings can emerge from such encounters.”
Maybe there are other works in the gallery, not part of the exhibition, which might also be considered ‘works in conversation’, performing speech acts involving reflection, imagination and repetition…
To that end, I’m just going to leave these two here…
Exquisite Cacophony by Sonia Boyce (2015) [2:04 – 3:02] Currently showing in Gallery 17 resource room
Exquisite Cacophony featuring Astronautalis and Elaine Mitchener ©2015 Sonia Boyce
“When I’m touring music, playing stupid, going from town to town, the band would arrive inside the city limits and pull Tinder out, and we’d start flipping through to see exactly what we’re getting into now and being like, girls and guys in Pittsburgh are really breaking it out! So many girls are standing next to tigers! What is that? White girls posing with tigers in fucking Thailand…
“It’s amazing. The best thing about Tinder that you could ever imagine is the fucking anthropological experiment that’s happening, when you’re sitting there and flipping through seeing fucking trends inside; of girls that are posing there next to tigers, and all of a sudden you had no idea that so many white chicks had so much damn access to tigers that barely exist. This animal is almost completely endangered, wiped off the face of the Earth, but it’s readily available to white girls to prove their sex-worth.” - Astronautalis
And…
Expectation By John William Godward (1911) Currently on display on the Balcony
Expectation by John William Godward © Manchester City Galleries
What other current works on display can you draw connections between?