When all else fails, we communicate with hands and feet. If we are trying to make ourselves understood but do not understand the local language, if we cannot speak, if words do not seem adequate to express the weight or urgency of what we want to say, we turn to gestures. We use them continually, without thinking about it. Gestures operate in parallel with verbal language, in three dimensions and without a grammar. A smile, a slap, a jump – each of these means something, even if we cannot put it into words.

When required, hands and feet communicate needs, intentions and attitudes. With movement, we can be direct, we escape the constraints of languages which are never as straightforward as they pretend to be. “Words are actually arbitrary cultural conventions posing as if they were not arbitrary at all” writes Michael Taussig.[1]  Words confine our expression, standardising it within the limits imposed by the culture that formed that language.

If you remove words from speech, much remains. To concentrate only on the words in a conversation means to ignore gestural, musical and dynamic elements. Unlike language, which leaves room for egotistical showiness, the remainder tends towards the urgency of necessity. The ‘umm’s and ‘aww’s, the tenor of a voice, the shape of an outstretched hand, the bearing of an interlocutor are elements that cannot always be pinned down; they try to evade categorisation. Being beyond words they are understood in a wordless fashion. The communicator is bypassing language.

If we take written and spoken language as the institutional method of communication, a tool of authority, then gestures can operate on the margins and in a clandestine and mercurial fashion accept or subvert that authority. Whether one thinks of oneself as possessing authority or not, we are individuals operating with languages that depend on a broadly shared understanding, until we use gesture or unformed sound.

Despite all this, written and spoken language dominates the quotidian. These artists’ films bring a peripheral expression to the fore. Works are gathered here from artists who have isolated, examined and engaged with non-linguistic communication. Their messages are all subject to the eye of a camera, an unequal partner in a conversation, so present situations that are as artificial as sitting at a desk to learn a language.

Mark Clare borrows the soundtrack from the Danish film Der perfekte menneske (1968) in his 2007 film of the same name, The Perfect Human. The earlier film by Jørgen Leth adopted the style of educational films and featured two young and attractive figures in a blank set demonstrating what the narration suggested. Clare transposes the scene to his cramped studio, where he performs for the camera in bright pink pyjamas. The ideal is made human, i.e. imperfect, but also attracts our sympathy more than the models whose paradigmatic qualities were praised in Leth’s film. A complete human must be more than an athletic archetype; they must also be capable of frailty, absurdity and humour.

Sigune Hamann’s Waver, (2009) tries to make contact with the viewer, but is suspended in the distance. Her tireless, good-humoured attempts are destined to bring her no closer to us. The half-smile on her face suggests a trusting openness, even though, shielding her eyes from the sun, she cannot clearly see who or what she is facing. In Hamann’s work limbo remains a hopeful state, yet nonetheless the continual repetition of her action brings no change, no improvement in her situation.

Like Hamann’s film, Ernesto Leal’s work Hoy Tampoco (Not today either), (2005) is a short looping sequence, though its mood is very different. Alone the small, everyday gesture of fingers tapping on a table attests to time wasted, to impatience and to thwarted expectations. The longer the film plays, the greater the mounting tension. Though the work was created six years ago, it is easy to read it in connection with the recent overflowing of anger in Arab states, where one man’s gesture of frustration and desperation had cataclysmic, far-reaching repercussions. Leal shows us that the slightest of signals can hide significant force.  

Roy Menachem Markovich and Jasmin Skurnik Glikzelig’s Gym&Tony – Pop, (2008) is three minutes of bacchanalian excess. To an upbeat tune a suave gentleman in white waiter’s gloves uncorks bottle after bottle of fizzed champagne for his dolled-up companion. Each pop seems to catalyse greater jollity, as her giggles suggest, till their good mood reaches a hiatus. Without dialogue to make the scene specific, this is the universal stuff of advertising fantasy, but the image palls as their gestures find no conclusion or satisfaction.

Fraternity, (2007), by Richard Mosse, also attests to excess, but with very different results. Mosse collaborated with the Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity at Yale University to make the work. Amongst famous alumni of the fraternity are five former presidents of the United States. For the prize of a keg of beer, Mosse challenged ten imposing figures from the fraternity (whose objects include ‘the Maintenance of Gentlemanly Dignity, Self-Respect, and Morality in All Circumstances’) to demonstrate which of them could yell the longest. What starts as a cacophony of aggressive male voices gradually dwindles as men fall by the wayside, till just one, red faced, almost apoplectic figure remains. This vocal yet wordless show of superiority is both ridiculous and horrifying.

Although Fabian Chiquet is the actor in his video Mein Tanz (My Dance), 2008, he submits to the authorship of strangers who interpret his movements. Chiquet filmed himself dancing alone, with the lack of inhibition of one who has been possessed by the music; he then posted this video online and collected the anonymous responses to his performance, integrating their words as lyrics to the music. The comments range from complimentary to abusive, with most commentators eager to make judgements about the figure they see based on his movements. By taking what would be typical behaviour in a darkened club in a crowd of strangers into an even more densely populated but less visceral online environment, Chiquet provokes oddly aggressive reactions.

This programme was put together by Aoife Rosenmeyer, a writer and curator based in Zurich.