1880 THAT is the first London exhibition by Berlin-based artists Christine Sun Kim and Thomas Mader is all about sign language and how it has been suppressed. Kim is deaf and the show is full of an impassioned - pleasingly pissed-off actually - cry for the right to communicate.
‘1880’ refers to the year of a crucial congress in Milan which debated Deaf education. Thanks to the presence of Alexander Graham Bell, the congress established the superiority of oral education over sign language in Deaf schools; Bell has skin in the game, since his father was a pioneer in lip reading and Visible Speech. Following the conference, the teaching of sign language was sidelined and suppressed, resulting in exclusion and stigma for Deaf people.
