Middling English explores some of the pleasures and complexities of language use, in and through writing. The exhibition brings together multi-sensory elements – spoken pieces, audiophonic compositions, printed broadsides and the strange memory world of pop lyrics – all presented through a stunning architectural installation. An animated webpiece accompanies the installation into the ether.

Caroline Bergvall is a Norwegian-French 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 her interest in speech detail, language histories and politics, verbal eclecticism and inventiveness derived from various kinds of cultural displacement.

Middling English investigates modes of writing, from the printed letter to a loose realm of visual, audio, kinetic and perceptual writing and reading environments. Bergvall combines Chaucerian contemporaneity with bilingual audioworks and spatial structures.

The artist has developed this exhibition with a range of collaborators including the architectural team DvsN, sound artists Zahra Mani and Adam Parkinson, designer Alex Prokop and the voice of Nicholas Rowe.

Caroline Bergvall: Middling English is a John Hansard Gallery exhibition, with support from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and Office for Contemporary Art Norway (OCA). Caroline Bergvall is currently AHRC Research Fellow in the Department of English, University Southampton.