Shifting Tongues (2025)

Charlotte Street presents a new exhibition titled Shifting Tongues, curated by Danqi Cai [dan-CHI Tsai]. Shifting Tongues gathers eight artists who explore the ruptures and reinventions of language—how it falters, adapts, and shapes identity. Their work spans painting, printmaking, handmade paper, ceramics, interactive art, and immersive installation. Artists include Renata Cassiano Alvarez (Veracruz, Mexico/Springdale, AR), Nada Bayazid (Overland Park, KS), Danqi Cai (Fayetteville, AR), Ranran Fan (Denton, TX), Samantha Haan (New Haven, CT/Kansas City, MO), Yoonmi Nam (Lawrence, KS), Yangbin Park (Memphis, TN), and Kiki Serna (New Haven, CT/Kansas City, MO).

While the exhibition began with a curatorial inquiry into linguistic relativism and multilingual experience, the assembled work expands this premise, moving across mediums and cultural contexts to explore the porous boundary between what is spoken and what is felt, what is inherited and what is made anew.

Language in this exhibition is not only verbal or textual—it is gestural, material, sonic, and spatial. Some artists foreground the structure of language itself, fragmenting and recombining linguistic forms. Other work reflects on the loss, transformation, or reconstitution of language through migration and memory. Still others craft devices and environments that stretch communication into sensory, interactive, and embodied realms. Across these approaches, language takes material form through acts of translation, reinterpretation, and reinvention.

Installation Views | Live Performance of Refrain in Three Parts | Movement Workshop: Shifting w/ Óscar Trujillo