Bogna Burska and Daniel Kotowski created the Polish Pavilion’s installation, Liquid Tongues, for the Venice Biennale, turning whale song into a means of communication. Accessibility is the whole point of the show, not a late addition. Ewa Chomicka and Jolanta Woszczenko curated the pavilion, with production from Zachęta National Gallery of Art.
From the moment visitors enter the space, they are submerged. A video projection of a Warsaw swimming pool floods the chamber with blue light, while low-frequency acoustic waves, patterned after the vocalizations and echolocation of cetacean marine mammals, press against the body from all directions. The sound does not merely arrive at the ear; it is worn, absorbed by the very flesh of the listener. For individuals whose bodies process the sensory world in distinct ways, this approach offers a quietly radical proposition: meaning can come through skin, bone, and sternum just as genuinely as it does through the ear.
The heart of the installation is “Chór w Ruchu,” a gathering of Deaf and hearing performers who speak at once about biologist Roger Payne, whose 1970 recordings Songs of the Humpback Whale sparked the whaling ban. They relate the story in both phonic English and International Sign Language. Alicja Czyczel’s choreography borrows the logic of fish shoals: Bodies move as a single distributed organism, with no soloist or conductor. Aleksandra Gryka’s score and Magda Mosiewicz’s cinematography round out a design where no single element — voice, sign, picture, vibration — carries more weight than any other. Every part is rendered from another form; none of it stands as the source itself.
Access as the Whole Point
The central idea behind the installation comes from the term “Deaf Gain,” coined by Deaf Studies scholar H-Dirksen L. Bauman, which frames deafness not as a lack but as a cultural and perceptual expansion. The key figure is Deaf artist Kotowski, whose body of work has long examined language, biopower, and the harm caused by phonetic instruction. His involvement ensures the project avoids becoming metaphor tourism — the brief borrowing of another group’s daily reality for purely aesthetic effect — and instead sets Liquid Tongues alongside the two artists who have most effectively brought Deaf ways of knowing into modern art: Christine Sun Kim and Joseph Grigely.
The thing that struck me most forcefully about the installation, as someone whose career has largely revolved around thinking about how access is so often treated as an afterthought, was that access isn’t added on top of the work as a separate feature; it is the whole way of knowing the work. Instead of having to translate myself into its terms, as a disabled visitor, the pavilion had already done the necessary work, all at once, from every possible angle.
How the Installation Works
The structure of the installation works on several levels at once:
- Video projections of a Warsaw swimming pool fill the room with aqueous blue light.
- Low-frequency acoustic waves modeled on cetacean marine mammal vocalizations and echolocation press against the body from all sides.
- A choir of Deaf and hearing performers tells the story of Roger Payne in phonic English and International Sign Language.
- Alicja Czyczel’s fish-shoal choreography moves the bodies as a single distributed organism.
- Aleksandra Gryka’s score and Magda Mosiewicz’s cinematography complete the work.
What This Means as Art
The installation at the Venice Biennale makes a case for what art can accomplish through experience rather than explanation. It uses the physical sensation of waves against the body as its main pathway of meaning, placed beside sign language, spoken language, and bodily movement. The presentation does not present disability as something to be corrected or made room for; instead, it presents it as a distinct means of perceiving and understanding the world around us.
The shift is bold, and it is executed with restraint rather than excess. The installation refrains from leaning on metaphor or feeling; it merely sets up a sensory setting and leaves the visitor to dwell within it. The work of conversion — from sign to speech, from sound to picture — is woven into the very design of the space, not tacked on afterward.
The Verdict on Liquid Tongues
The success of Liquid Tongues comes from making access a central part of the work, rather than something added later. It is an installation that requires the visitor to inhabit their own body, to experience sound through feeling rather than simply hearing it, and to observe movement as motion rather than merely watching it.
Instead of merely speaking about accessibility, Liquid Tongues puts it into action. The installation shows what can be achieved when access is built into the very foundation of a work of art from the start.
Source material: “The Polish Pavilion Dissolves You in the Politics of Sound,” Hyperallergic.
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