The Lips of History, an exhibition featuring Pelumi Adejumo, Bia Davou, Hazel Meyer & Cait McKinney, Olga Micińska, Kirsten Pieroth, Atsuko Tanaka and the Houweling Telecommuseum. Presented artist, in one way or another, navigate and interrogate the networks and inventions responsible for the distribution of language, image and sound. Forming the backbone of this project are materials, objects and machines on loan from the Houweling Telecommuseum—a small volunteer-run museum in the north of Rotterdam housed in a former telephone exchange, whose collection spans telecommunications from 1880 to 2010.

A Tale of A Tub is additionally excited to launch a quarterly bulletin. The bulletins will be a vehicle for a corresponding writing program, through which people from a range of professional and personal backgrounds will be invited to write the exhibition text for each project—and to do so through the prism of their own research and experience, rather than as a direct reflection on or explanation of the project in question. Bulletins will be distributed to the surrounding neighbourhood and available in the space, doubling as both a place for the community to meet and as a revised take on the standard exhibition text format. As the inaugural contributor, artist and academic Cait McKinney reflects on the role of the telephone—its operators and activators—to plot out its significance within feminist and queer networks of self-organisation and expression.

More about Isabelle Sully, Pelumi Adejumo and Olga Micińska.