I Heard Talking Is Dangerous


Solo exhibition curated by Jakob Schäfer
EIGEN+ART Lab, Berlin, Germany
March–May 2022

Proceed At Your Own Risk
Performance 6pm Friday April 29









Design in collaboration with Ben Evans James
Fabrication by Johann Jakob
Photos by Eike Walkenhorst

“How is it that we feel connected to other people? Can these moments be retroactively induced, and if so, what is the code of intimacy? And how does it relate to digital code? Lauren Lee McCarthy deals with questions like these. Her practice has roots in the digital, and the artist's performances and web-pieces reach far into the physical world. […]

I heard TALKING IS DANGEROUS, a performance for which McCarthy, standing on the doorsteps of friends, delivers a monologue via a text-to-speech programme: about safety, distance, all that. But especially about the ever-shifting dangers of everyday life and the constantly updated advice on how to avoid them.” […]

Yet McCarthy has always alluded to something darker, something harder to understand. There is a fundamental dialectic in her work. Isn't being watched also a kind of being part of a greater whole? Isn't it also a form of closeness, albeit a simulated one? This is not an intuitive or easily digestible insight, but the world cannot simply be divided into bad technology and good, genuine human proximity, or whatever the cultural pessimistic juxtapositions are at the moment.


—Excerpts from press release by Philipp Hindahl