Join Griffin Art Projects’ Indigenous Curatorial Assistant, Emmett Hanly, for a series of guided tours of Griffin’s current exhibition, Alibaba Conundrum, on Sunday afternoons throughout the season! 

Alibaba Conundrum, The Origin of the World, 2021, Inkjet on photo paper, 60” (w) x 36” (h). Courtesy of the artists.

The Alibaba Conundrum project considers how the English language and its enduring global impact directly but quietly conditions everyday experience and how it surreptitiously shapes individual subjects and citizens by posing as the 'norm.’

Through installations comprising a short film, sculpture, wallpaper, and a series of printed, image-based objects, Alibaba Conundrum calls our attention to the problem of escape—how can one find an “outside” to the English language? Alibaba Conundrum suggests that although there is no seemingly geographical “outside” to the hegemony of the English language, the possibility for an ontological "outside" is to be found from within its structures. It is a conundrum of epic proportions, which the artists demonstrate unequivocally within this project.