Teresa Solar Abboud

Teresa Solar Abboud’s latest solo show “Foreign Office” conveys a shift from her usual video practice, which has mostly focused on language, translation, and the construction of meaning. These topics remain at the core of her practice, but they are now tackled through sculpture. Here, she presents two ceramics that that were inspired by Thamsenqa Jantjie’s onstage gestures at Nelson Mandela’s recent funeral, where, as it is widely known, he posed as a sign language interpreter while making a mysterious and nonsensical array of gestures. Solar Abboud has always been interested in the tangible aspects of language, though I doubt she has ever gone this far.

It is important to stress that Solar Abboud has not attempted to “master” pottery (just as Jantjie did not seem to master his own purported discipline). To create the works on view, Solar Abboud used a potter’s wheel and mimicked the spurious interpreter’s gestures. Placed on the ground or supported by benches in a neat installation, the resulting vertical shapes are ultimately abstract not only because of their form but because they stem from a corrupted and illegible language. They stand as vibrant yet opaque signifiers that bridge the gap between mind and body. And in so doing, they let the unconscious perform.

In a similar vein, a few hanging sculptures coated with shades of pink fluorescent paint evoke the slickness one expects of diplomatic language. They are also shaped by sign language—here, the signs for the Spanish words embassy and revolution. Language is thus created through the filling of a space, which is an apt metaphor for sculpture. Significantly, a potter’s wheel stands inside the show as a minimal shape that evokes the self-reflexive tension between language and form the show seeks to portray.