‘Yay, to have a mouth!’ Rose Easton/Ginny on Frederick

Yay, to have a mouth!

Rebecca Ackroyd, Gabriella Boyd, Sylvie Fleury, Phillip Gabriel, R.I.P., Germain Maggi, Hambling Michael, Ho Sang, Woo Kim, Hannah Murray, I.W. Payne, Mike Silva, Jenkin van Zyl, Barbara Wesołowska

14 February – 29 March 2025 

Rose Easton / Ginny on Frederick

Yay, to have a mouth! brings together a diverse group of artists to explore the mouth as a site of sensation, speech, desire, and vulnerability. From intimate gestures to violent disruptions, the works in the exhibition trace the mouth as a threshold—between inside and outside, silence and expression, power and submission. This multivocal presentation moves from the physiological to the poetic, offering the mouth as both a literal and symbolic space: a portal through which bodies feel, speak, break, and transform.

Across sculpture, painting, installation, video, and performance, the show engages the mouth as an organ of pleasure, a vehicle for language, a target of violence, and a metaphor for consumption. The participating artists approach this theme from radically different angles—erotic, humorous, surreal, and political—generating a dense and layered conversation.

In a moment where speech is hyper-mediated and bodily experience often abstracted, Yay, to have a mouth! reclaims physicality and vulnerability as essential sites of meaning. The mouth becomes not only a tool for communication, but a deeply charged space where pain and joy coexist, where identity is formed and disrupted, and where the unspeakable is given form.

The exhibition unfolds as a loose anatomy of the mouth—its functions, desires, traumas, and potentialities. From biting and bleeding to kissing and confessing, the works in Yay, to have a mouth! map a corporeal and emotional terrain that is at once deeply personal and politically urgent.