Speechless marks rosenclaire’s fourth solo exhibition at Goodman Gallery in which Rose Shakinovsky and Claire Gavronsky question the power of words to represent and relate to our surroundings.

In the words of the artists: ‘this exhibition registers an inability to comprehend and articulate the political, social and ecological crises experienced around the world today. This implies the breakdown of all secure structures including language, communication and materiality itself. We approach the ‘unspeakable’ from a position of warning but also of wonder.’

Speechless takes its cue from current discourse on the Anthropocene, described by writer Robert Macfarlane as ‘the new epoch of geological time in which human activity is considered such a powerful influence on the environment, climate and ecology of the planet that it will leave a long-term signature in the strata record.’ Macfarlane warns that ‘we have become titanic geological agents, our legacy legible for millennia to come’ in an attempt to urge human beings to consider the implications of our actions in terms of ‘deep time’ – beyond the here and now.