Middling English: An exhibition by Caroline Bergvall, John Hansard Gallery Event

Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Creative Writing Fellow 2007-10, Caroline Bergvall, will conclude her fellowship in English at Southampton with an exhibition entitled 'Middling English', supported by the AHRC and the Office for Contemporary Art in Norway (OCA). The exhibition will take place at the John Hansard Gallery, Highfield Campus, University of Southampton.

Caroline Bergvall is a French-Norwegian national and long-term UK resident. An artist and writer, she works across media and writes in English and trans-English modes.

Middling English pursues Bergvall’s interest in speech detail, language histories and politics, verbal eclecticism and inventiveness derived from various kinds of cultural displacement. Her work investigates writing practices that move from the authority of the printed letter to a loose realm of mixed reading and viewing codes - visual, audio, kinetic, perceptual. Chaucerian contemporaneity is recombined with songline patterns, systemic grids and luminescent texts.

The exhibition is organised as an architectural structure of multi-sensory and aural elements, and will take place both on-site and off-site via an online exchange station.

The exhibition was highly praised in The Guardian's exhibition report: 'Thank heaven then for Caroline Bergvall, an artist and poet pushing the boundaries of language in a blogged-up and twittering digital world' (The Guardian, 4 September 2010).

Caroline's exhibition will run until 23 October 2010.