The Polish Pavilion Dissolves You in the Politics of Sound
At the Venice Biennale, whale songs become a means for communication, opening up a dialogue on accessibility.
VENICE — I have spent much of my career as a crip curator and art historian thinking about how access is often treated as an afterthought — the ramp added late, the caption burned in at the last minute, the interpreter budgeted only if funds remain. What startled me most about Liquid Tongues, Bogna Burska and Daniel Kotowski’s installation for the Polish Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, is that access is not appended to the work; it’s the entire epistemology. As a disabled visitor, I did not have to translate myself to enter it; the pavilion had already done the work, in every direction at once.
Curated by Ewa Chomicka and Jolanta Woszczenko and produced by Zachęta National Gallery of Art, the installation submerges the visitor immediately. Video projections shot in a Warsaw swimming pool fill the space with aqueous blue, while low-frequency acoustic waves modeled on cetacean marine mammal vocalizations and echolocation press against the body. Sound here is not overheard; it is worn. For those of us whose bodies process the sensory world differently, this is a quietly radical proposition: meaning arrives through skin, bone, and sternum as legitimately as through the ear.
At the center is “Chór w Ruchu (Choir in Motion)” (2026), an ensemble of Deaf and hearing performers simultaneously narrating the story of biologist Roger Payne, whose 1970 recordings Songs of the Humpback Whale helped catalyze the whaling ban, in phonic English and International Sign Language. Alicja Czyczel’s choreography borrows the logic of fish shoals: Bodies move as a single distributed organism, with no soloist or conductor. Aleksandra Gryka's score and Magda Mosiewicz’s cinematography complete a structure in which no channel — voice, sign, image, vibration — is primary. Everything is translation; nothing is the original.
The conceptual anchor is “Deaf Gain” (2010), a term coined by Deaf Studies scholar H-Dirksen L. Bauman that reframes deafness as not a deficit but cultural and perceptual expansion. Kotowski, a Deaf artist whose practice has long interrogated language, biopower, and the oppression of phonetic training, is the crucial figure here. His authorship keeps the work from tipping into metaphor tourism — the temporary borrowing of another group’s lived experience as an aesthetic frame — and it places Liquid Tongues in conversation with the two artists who have most powerfully brought Deaf epistemology into contemporary art: Christine Sun Kim and Joseph Grigely.
