“I always thought that ‘the voice’ was meant to indicate a kind of genuine, authentic, absolute individuation, which struck me as (a) undesirable and (b) impossible. Whereas a ‘sound’ was really within the midst of this intense engagement with everything: with all the noise that you’ve ever heard, you struggle somehow to make a difference, so to speak, within that noise. And that difference isn’t necessarily about you as an individual, it’s much more simply about trying to augment and to differentiate what’s around you. And that’s what a sound is for me”. Fred Moten, 2018.

Join artist Adam Gallagher for I am the one in ten, a performative tour and discussion on the occasion of the current collaborative exhibition at Auto Italia, Words fail me. Taking as a starting point two new texts written specifically as responses to the project by Nikhil Vettukattil and Ari Skanda, Gallagher will take the audience through the space taking his lead from the issues raised in these new pieces of writing and opening up the processes and questions at the heart of the site-specific sculptural and audio works that occupy the exhibition space.

In his new text Clarity of Expression, Ari Skanda challenges the conceptual basis for the show, problematising any commonly held notion that art can communicate where words fail. Gallagher will respond to this text, proposing alternative re-readings and re-framings for the show from himself and Nikhil Vettukattil, whose textual contribution will be made available in the exhibition space during the event and remain installed for the remainder of the show.

Adam Gallagher is an artist based in and from London, who works mainly through performance; challenging it’s reliance upon temporality and working against the performative-artist-ego. Recent projects include: ‘War-Pig’, Local Project Space, (2017), and ’Polly Anything’, Lima Zulu (2017). Commissioned writing include ‘Special Category Status’ and ‘Trust’ for The Site for Contemporary Psychoanalysis as part of their Post-Psychoanalysis event programme (2018) and ‘Extra Judicial Killing’ and ‘What did I do to deserve this?’, Montez Press, Interjection Calendar (2017).

Ari Skanda is a writer and curator. He holds a BA in History of Art from Goldsmiths, University of London, and is currently working with Cheuk Ng and Aric Miller on a curatorial project that involves the conceptualisation of new ways of doing didacticism in art.

Nikhil Vettukattil is an artist and writer interested in the role of representation in framing and interpreting lived experience. Recent projects include ‘Denying the Inflammability of the Twigs Found in the Copse This Morning’ at 3236RLS, London, ‘Perception is Reading’ for Notes/Cashmere Radio, Berlin, ‘Either the nearest or the farthest away’ for bizoux.online, and ‘Cosmopolitan Universal Cinema’ at Arnolfini, Bristol and Close-Up, London.