In ALL THE SAME BRIGHT, Hanne Lippard presents a newly commissioned sound installation drawing upon her award-winning Preis der Nationalgalerie (National Gallery Prize) installation at Berlin's Hamburger Bahnhof. At its center, a monolithic stele sculpture anchors a nearly empty gallery space—ringed only by shimmering curtains, lights, pleats, and shadows—while the stele emits its own low, continuous drone from within. This contemporary Rosetta Stone serves as an entry point for a multi-channel audio composition: an enveloping sonic climate forms within the liminal gallery space, wherein layers of English and Norwegian speech overlap. Like ancient stone pillars that marked territory or honored gods, the stele grounds this exploration of our global translingual experience.
Lippard is a Norwegian-British artist based in Berlin whose sound installations explore the materiality of language and the human voice as a sculptural medium. Working primarily with her own voice, she creates immersive audio environments that transform spoken words into expanded sensory experiences. ALL THE SAME BRIGHT draws from American poet-émigré Gertrude Stein's literary experiments; the exhibition's title itself is a borrowed line from Gertrude Stein. Throughout this installation and her broader practice, Lippard excavates Stein's revolutionary approach to language, utilizing words as substance rather than a representational tool. Like Stein, who famously wrote "A rose is a rose is a rose" to strip words of accumulated associations and restore their immediacy, Lippard uses repetition, rhythm, and deliberate pacing to draw attention to the physical qualities of speech—breath, tone, inflection—revealing layers of meaning beyond semantic content.
Central to ALL THE SAME BRIGHT is how Lippard's formative bilingual acquisition of Norwegian and English created a heightened awareness of linguistic overlap and divergence. As a child, after first simultaneously learning the spoken form of both languages, Lippard discovered strange coincidences when she began to read, such as when words converge sonically but diverge in meaning—homophones and cognates that reveal language as a system of connection and slippage. Her script incorporates these linguistic doublings alongside fragments from advertising, social media, communication threads, as well as personal anecdotes, which she rearranges to echo Stein's radical syntax and circular structures.
The installation's minimal visual presence allows Lippard's recorded voice to sculpt the space itself. Her performance explores how repeated utterance can simultaneously empty and intensify meaning, while the focus on Norwegian-English homophones in particular, transforms listening into an unstable activity where audiences cannot be certain which language they hear. This mirrors both the uncanny experience of a foreigner trying to find meaning while listening to sounds they recognize but do not fully understand, and the artist's own childhood experience of realizing that familiar sounds looked alien on the page. By inhabiting this space of linguistic strangeness, Lippard invites us to dwell within a contact zone of anticipation and sensitivity where foreignness becomes not merely biographical detail but a methodological position. From this vantage point of perpetual "outsiderness", she proposes perspectives that those intimately embedded within a single culture or subject position might never consider. The instability of translation itself comes to generate new forms of understanding and identity.
Special thanks go to Marcus Pal, Marcel Weber, Renato Grieco, Felicia Gullstrand, Mickis Gullstrand, Aksel Øien, Marc Pricop, Terje Aursøy, Cas van Son, Ida Horn Hanssen, Kvadrat, Jo Wang, Marina Höxter, Ula Jern, LambdaLambdaLambda, Callie’s Berlin, La Beque Residency, Luc Meier, and Annika Svendsen Finne.
ALL THE SAME BRIGHT is curated by Adam Kleinman with Joe Rowley.