Dina Danish’s practice uses conceptual strategies underpinned by humour to examine our relationship to language. She is interested in repetition, mimesis and the slippages and gaps that occur through these actions.
Dictated But Not Read is Danish’s first solo exhibition in London and features an installation and an event, both from her recent tongue twister series of works. Danish creates different approaches to performing tongue twisters as alternatives to their normal failure-bound utterance. On the opening night of the exhibition a party was held at the gallery in celebration of Elizabeth’s Birthday, an event conceived by Dina Danish based on the tongue twister Elizabeth’s Birthday is on the third Thursday of this month, the event then exists in the exhibition as a poster, detailing the number of cakes, party goers, candles etc. The other work from the tongue twister series is titled Seventy Seven Benevolent Elephants and consists of seventy seven found elephant figurines displayed on a shelf that extend around the gallery walls.
Also in the exhibition is the video Practicing Foreign Languages, 2008, which depicts the artist reciting words and phrases shifting between English, French, German and Arabic homophones and onomatopoeias, the rhythm of the words collapsing them into each other.
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Dina Danish (Egypt/France b. 1981) studied her Masters of Fine Arts in Painting and Drawing, California College of the Arts, San Francisco, US (2006—2008); her Bachelor of Arts in Art, at The American University in Cairo, Cairo, EG (2000—2005); and completed a residency at Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten, (2009—2010). Danish is represented by Barbara Seiler Gallery, Zurich, SpazioA, Pistoia, and Stiger Van Doesberg, Amsterdam. Selected recent solo exhibitions include A Place in The Sun, Nile Sunset Annex Cairo, EG; To Be A Pinball, SpazioA, Pistoia, IT (both 2015) Double Bubble Gum, Doubles Bubble, Barbara Seiler Gallery, Zurich,CH (2013). Selected recent group shows include: The Joycean Society, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, NL, curated by Noor Mertens; Volkskrant Beeldende Kunstprijs, Stedelijk Museum Schiedam, NL, curated by Wilma Suto; (both 2015) and My Vocabulary Did This To Me (performance) South London Gallery, London, UK (2014).
