Sirens are alarms: they signal harm. In an ancient world, sirens were figured as women (part bird or part fish but all witch) whose seductive song was an invitation to self-harm. Both siren songs, ancient and nascent, remain in the realm of danger, then. Still, if our conceptions of sirens have changed, our notions of control have not. We would still like to save ourselves in every instance, sweet song or not. Yet in the ancient poem that made them infamous, of the sirens who sang to some crew, no body was described just a voice. The seduction the siren offered was cognitive; it was knowledge. Its technology was some “honeyed song,” emitted as if from a speaker over land across water indicating other ideological borders: between exile and home, foreign and familiar, female and male, nonhuman and human, danger and safety, transgression and normativity, sonic disobedience and sonic obedience, that is, language as noise and language as linguistic meaning. These borders-as-binaries, all pale, mineral shores, were unjust and untrue. But poetry is politics, always.

SIREN (some poetics) examines what lies beyond such borders and binaries—ancestral, technological, epistemological, literary, patriarchal, corporeal, emotional or otherwise. Devoted to the voice—as aesthetic signature or the production of self and sound—and the avatar-like bodies we build and break around it, the exhibition considers technologies of myth and mouth, earth and alarm, gender and poetics. Through the work of approximately seventeen artists and poets of various generations and geographies, the show posits practices that employ a grammar of sign and sound systems, at once figuring, resisting, writing, and voicing the visual field. Moving away from the cool, clinical, conceptual and mostly two-dimensional exhibitions that have so often stood for language and poetry as a visual art practice, in which the white cube stands in for the pale architectonic page, SIREN is situated in the dank earth and its kaleidoscopic ecosystems. Both human and nonhuman forms of language-making and poetics are put forth, from precolonial myth to ludic science fiction, the bootlegged oracular line to critical fabulation, fungal networks to gut bacteria, text to textile to poem to prism to algorithm. Indeed, the works on view often emit and evidence a kind of parapoetics: poetry as opaque metabolic structuring or as some wild surfacing.