Exhibitions
Libby Leshgold Gallery, Emily Carr University of Art + Design
vertigo of swallows in my ear
Hong-Kai Wang
with Haytham el-Wardany, Phoebe Giannisi, Gavin Steingo, and Matariki Williams.
vertigo of swallows in my ear is part of Hong-Kai Wang’s ongoing research into kua a tseh, Taiwanese ballad booklets. Wang’s close read of the moral ballad The Great Battle between the Fly and the Mosquito is a consideration of practices of listening as embodied and relational. While fables and folk tales often end with a clear caution or lesson, The Great Battle Between the Fly and Mosquito is distinct in that its delivery and message remains contingent on the time and the environment of transmission and reception. Wang focusses on the way these songs have been interpreted, improvised and sung over time, and how these changes have emphasized collective forms of authorship particularly during times of social and political upheaval.
The iterative nature of Wang’s work and wider research reflects the way these moral ballads circulated. The first iteration of this project took the form of a book, Our Words Don’t Suit Prophecies Anymore, and an installation at the Taichung Art Museum in 2025. Building on previous iterations of Wang’s installation vertigo of swallows in my ear will feature a newly commissioned sound work of The Great Battle Between the Fly and the Mosquito sung by Ting Melody accompanied by Shiu Jin Lian on a large Taiwanese lute.
The publication took as its point of departure the moral ballad The Great Battle Between the Fly and the Mosquito to reorient our comprehension of human and other-than-human relations, and practices of listening. Within different literary genres, such as fables, myths, and folk tales, animals are granted the ability to speak, allowing for interspecies communication and abolishing any hierarchy between species. Within these stories, a cast of insects, animals, and mythical creatures frequently take on human characteristics through their speech and behaviour, which can be interpreted as an imposition or reflection of human desires, needs, and will. The contributing writers —Haytham el-Wardany, Phoebe Giannisi, Gavin Steingo, and Matariki Williams reflect on how social and environmental conditions shape practices of listening in critical and expansive ways.
This publication Our Words Don’t Suit Prophecies Anymore (co-published by Libby Leshgold Gallery and Taichung Art Museum) forms the basis of an installation of Wang’s work included in the exhibition A Call of All Being presented at the Taichung Art Museum from December 2025–April 2026.
BIOGRAPHIES
Currently based in Taipei, Taiwan, Hong-Kai Wang is an interdisciplinary artist working across exhibition making, performance, writing, publishing and education. Wang’s research-based practice is concerned with ethics of listening in relation to the politics of missing knowledge and memory. Her work seeks to examine divergent modes of attention and to conceive of emergent time-spaces that critically interweave histories of labor, economies of co-habitation, and the production of knowledge and desire.
Haytham el-Wardany is a writer and translator, living and working in Berlin. He spent the last year listening to talking animals, in fables and elsewhere, and learned from them how to speak in moments of danger. His latest book, Jackals and The Missing Letters (Al-Karma 2023), considers forgotten expressions of hope within Arabic fables, where animals speak and humans listen, in a moment of post “Arab Spring” speechlessness. In previous publications, including The Book of Sleep and How to Disappear, el-Wardany has examined the potential of passivity, through regimes of listening and the dialectics of sleep and vigilance. He is the recipient of the Keith Haring Fellowship in Art and Activism 2022/2023.
Phoebe Giannisi is a poet born in Athens, Greece. Giannisi works as a Professor at the University of Thessaly in the Department of Architecture in Volos, Thessaly. Her hybrid poetic work frequently slips between writing, performance, and media. Working with animal poetics and land songs, she engages various methodologies including land-based field recording, and performance to create a polyphony of voices and texts into what she calls chimeric poetics. She has curated exhibitions, poetic installations, and presented poetry through expanded multimedia and performance formats. Her books have been translated in various languages, and, recently, Cicada (2022) and Chimera (2024), published by New Directions and translated by Brian Sneeden have been shortlisted for the National Award for Translation in Poetry in the United States. Her next book, Goatsong will be published by Fitzcarraldo in November 2025.
Gavin Steingo is a South African musician, scholar, and activist. He is Professor in the Department of Music at Princeton University, where he is also affiliated with the programs in Media & Modernity, Film Studies, Jazz Studies, and African Studies. Gavin is the author of two books, Interspecies Communication: Sound and Music Beyond Humanity (2024), and Kwaito’s Promise: Music and the Aesthetics of Freedom in South Africa (2016), and co-editor of the book series “Critical Conjunctures in Music and Sound.” He co-directs The Animal Song Collective, a research initiative bringing together scientists and humanists to explore the idea of animal song from a cross-disciplinary perspective.
Matariki Williams, with tribal affiliations to Ngāi Tūhoe, Ngāti Hauiti, Taranaki, Ngāti Whakaue, Te Atihaunui-a-Pāpārangi, is a curator, writer and editor in the arts and cultural sector. In 2024-2025, Matariki held the Oroya Day Fellowship in New Zealand Art History in the Art History programme at Victoria University focusing on the continuum of Māori art practice, and is currently teaching the Tohu Tiaki Taonga pilot programme at Te Wānanga o Aotearoa. Previous roles include as Senior Historian, Mātauranga Māori at the Ministry for Culture and Heritage and Curator Mātauranga Māori at Te Papa Tongarewa, the Museum of New Zealand. She is a committee member for Te Hā o Ngā Pou Kaituhi Māori – National Māori Writers Network. Matariki lives and works in Whakatāne, Aotearoa New Zealand.