HV_installation

"Through his research and practise in Botswana, recording click language speech by individuals who collaborate as performers at the beginning of a process, Wynne constructs an experience that flickers on the boundaries between speech and sound, and the various levels of meaning that can be derived from human communications. Simultaneously, the work alerts the perceiver to the beauty of language and its potential as a plastic medium, to specifics and generalities, to political and economic realities, and to the troubled, yet fruitful connections that can be nurtured in spite of an intimidating geographical, linguistic, cultural, and technological divide. "

David Toop

from Foreword to Hearing Voices

Brunei Gallery, SOAS, University of London, 2005

"Sound shifts around the room and each portrait, as in a fairy tale, takes its turn at speaking to us. But Wynne underlines the fragility of these languages by only giving occasional glimpses of actual words. The rest of the time we stand amidst a soundscape that he has created from the voices' raw material: clicks are processed to generate bell tones, while vowels are massively extended into shimmering drones. The result is an Ambient music, calm and beautiful, in which we have space to think about the issues underlying the piece; but it's also a simmering, ominous sound which conjures the desert itself."

Clive Bell

The Wire magazine

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Botswana National Museum, 2005

The opening of this installation in Gaborone was delayed because of the Botswana government's sensitivity to issues relating to the Khoi and San peoples, the indigenous inhabitants of southern Africa. Roy Sesana, chair of the First peoples of the Kalahari and one of the subjects of my piece, is currently engaged in a high court case challenging the legality of the government's forced eviction of the San from land they have occupied for thousands of years in what is now the Central Kalahari Game Reserve. Their main concern was with what Roy says about the oppression of San peoples and the threats to their culture and their languages on the CD-ROM I produced (in conjunction with the Hans Rausing Endangered Languages Project) to accompany the exhibition and which I refused to withdraw. The Permanent Secretary finally gave his approval 4 days after the scheduled opening.

National Art Gallery of Namibia, 2005

"The portraiture integrated into the playback system of this installation counters the shift towards a detachment from human agency, yet also engages with the mediating effects of recording technology. Faces are obscured; voices are extended, or filtered, until their meaning is abstracted. These faces, and voices, are both highlighted by the wider world of digital communications, and with conscious irony, absorbed by its power."

David Toop

from Foreword to Hearing Voices