Eva Barto: Weak Tongue

Considering that the assets embezzled by their President to live in luxury should be returned to the people, the demonstrators did not ransack or loot the premises but wished to open them up to the public as a Museum of Corruption. —Tripadvisor: Museum of Corruption

Weak Tongue, Eva Barto’s first solo exhibition in a Parisian institution, is a continuation of a research around the notions of support, financial support, and their ambiguities.

A changeover will take place from July 25 to October 2, in the exhibition Sharp Smile*, which will be held at the MACRO in Rome.

The literal translation of Langue Faible, Weak Tongue refers to the deviations and errors in language and the dubious and ambivalent behaviours they imply.

The exhibition is constructed using incisive doublespeak that is constantly being turned around. It manifests itself in the manipulation, interpretation and deviation of laws and rules that protect and spare, both those who make them, and those who circumvent them.

Weak Tongue exaggerates the opportunistic method in place in these strategies, conveying it through borrowed testimonies, accumulating official and unofficial, real, erroneous, or contradictory versions [1]. The shift from one discourse to another as well as the treatment of the exhibition space to neutralized it, establishes a regime of suspicion and leads us to consider the context as a whole, to measure what is said and what is not said, allowing the corruptive dynamic to spread and spare nothing.

As a result, the exhibition is simultaneously a witness, an accomplice and a hostage to the mechanisms at work. It sets up a whole apparatus of revelations, omissions and protections of information, obliged to provide some of its data only beyond the scope of its framework and temporality, where the elements of its complementarity* can then unfold.

[1] The Mithridates Method, videos, 1/3, 2/3.

The title refers to the King, who, fearing being poisoned, administered a tiny dose of poison to himself every day so that his body could acclimatise to it.

Eva Barto discusses the power relations governing property codes, notably through the study of hegemonic discourses, mechanisms of corruption and the impasses of the law. Her work has been presented in several solo exhibitions, at the gb agency gallery, at the Villa Arson (2016), at the Kunstverein Nuremberg, at the Künstlerhaus Stuttgart (2021), and soon at the MACRO in Rome (2022). She has also exhibited at the Marcelle Alix Gallery (2015), the Rennes Biennial and the Kadist Foundation (2016), the Pernod Ricard Corporate Foundation (2017, 2019), the Wattis Art Center (2017), the Max Mayer Gallery (2018, 2021), the Secession Museum (2018), the Anafi Biennial (2018), and the Grand Café (2020). Winner of the Étant Donné grant in collaboration with the SculptureCenter New York, she will continue her research on legal vacuums in September 2022. In 2016, she created the editorial project Buttonwood Press. She is co-founder of the art worker’s rights collective La Buse and co-hosts the show ForTune on * Duuu Radio. Since 2019, she has taught at the École des Beaux-Arts de Lyon.