An altar for the fleshy tongue, 2023-2024
An altar for the fleshy tongue, KUVA/Tila Gallery, Helsinki, 2024 photo by Sakari Vika
ON THE WORK:
An altar for the fleshy tongue was shown as a solo show at the RMIT Gallery, Swanston St. Melbourne VIC (2023), as part of the 6th Asian Art Triennale Manchester: Transvaluation, (2025), and the KUVA/ Tila Gallery, Helsinki (2024) group show Palaamisia (Different Points of Return).
An altar for the fleshy tongue is part of the collection of the Vienna Museum
(Sammlung Wien Museum).
THE EXHIBIT
Stephanie Misa presents us with a proposition: can languages be held within the body across generations, and if so, what tools do we need to reawaken this dormant knowledge?
The persistence of spoken languages - their extinctions, resurrections, and resilience around the globe – forms a focal point for Misa that allows her to examine her own linguistic inheritance as it relates to other people. Misa’s first language, Bisaya, is the language that is spoken in the two-channel video where she talks to her son, who does not understand her mother tongue.
She does this not as a means to teach her language, but rather as a way to gauge how much of her language lives, unconsciously, within her child. The tongue, as the site where language leaves the body and enters the world, becomes a focus for Misa, as she seeks to understand what secrets potentially lay embedded in that fleshy transmitThe installation is punctuated with sites of gratitude: a contemporary wax cylinder recording of Misa singing points to her interest in some of the most globally significant language recordings in existence. The 19th Century invention of the phonograph made it possible for sound to be captured by a needle onto a wax cylinder (known as a record) and played back. Misa creates an altar of chicken’s feet cast as wax candles along the rear, smoke-stained wall; a spectral residue evoking the summoning of powerful immaterial forces and a bridging of the past and the present. The main altar, a tree branch, affixed to the floor by delicate pillars of wax, is at the heart of Misa’s installation – it hovers in the room, as tenuous and fragile as the mother tongue of a colonised people.
Julia Powles, Curator RMIT Gallery
Photos by Sakari Viika and Vincent Roumagnac
STEPHANIE MISA
Selected Exhibitions:
Feminist Futures Forever
Belvedere21, Vienna
5 November 2026 -8 March 2027
upcoming
Remittance
Mead Art Museum, Amherst MA
15 September 2026- 3 January 2027
Oculus
Heidelberg Kunstvereien
15 March - 18 May 2025
An altar for the fleshy tongue
6th Asian Triennale Manchester: Transvaluation 2025
RMIT Gallery Melbourne, 2022
Translating Worlds
Depo Istanbul
29 November 2023 - 27 January 2024
Hallow Hollow
Kunstraum Lakeside, Klagenfurt
4 October – 10 November 2023
Not Your Ornament (Mai Ling)
Wiener Secession
15 September– 12 November 2023
The Snake & the Archive
Governor’s Island, New York, NY
15 August – 10 September 2022
Filipinos, Cannibalism, & Mothers Dancing on Tongues
9th Bucharest Biennale: Farewell to Research
28 June 2020- 13 May 2021
The Diamond (Princess) is Forever
Vera List Center for Art & Politics, NY
16 November 2020Stephanei Misa and Multiple Spirits, 2022About
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