Gallery 1

DEF

Sofya Gollan, Angie Goto, Irene Hollub & Riona Tindal

DEF Collective brings together four Deaf artists, Angie Goto, Irene Holub, Riona Tindal and Sofya Gollan, each developing a practice grounded in Deaf perception, language and lived experience. Rather than gathering around a single theme, the exhibition places four distinct artistic methods in conversation, each refusing the baseline of a hearing default.

Goto’s paintings use colour, gesture and form to translate sensation into painterly structure. Holub’s suspended large-format photographs and video works, drawn from Manifesto of Silences, Invisible Skin and CHAOS, frame language deprivation, visibility and Deaf self-representation. Tindal’s wall-mounted works on paper extend her background in scientific illustration into layered studies of communication, memory and partial legibility. Gollan’s wall-mounted sculpture uses scale and physical presence to reflect on social judgement on the Deaf body. Her moving-image works use infrared capture, distortion and scale to render sign language as image, movement and spatial encounter.

Across these practices, the exhibition positions Deaf-centred art-making as a radical form of knowledge, grounded in visual attention, embodied communication and the politics of access.

The collective’s work sits within a broader shift in contemporary art toward Deaf-led practice, presented here through four artists working independently yet in relation, each offering a distinct material language for Deaf experience, sensory knowledge and embodied difference.