The Mouth
Before I knew how to speak English, I knew how to perform it. I learned English from television; I would watch people open their mouths and stretch their lips in all kinds of ways as this foreign language came out. I would then mimic their facial expressions, hoping to produce a sound similar to theirs, utterly failing. Anyhow, I learned the language through other people’s mouths: actors’ mouths, singers’mouths. Later in school, where English was my second foreign language, the teacher, who was not a native speaker either, taught us how to put our lips, tongues, and teeth in all kinds of positions so that the sounds we were to produce would sound as native as possible. We, of course, never did, and it kind of didn’t matter; English is not a single thing anyway. There is the English of the university, the English of the grant application, the English of the museum, the English of the gallery dinner, the English of the press release. There is the English that sounds educated and the English that sounds expensive. There is the English that can say I disagree without sounding angry, and I don’t understand without sounding stupid. English itself is not my enemy. English isn’t inherently oppressive. But the social value attached to particular Englishes is. Therefore, I suspect the problem is, as usual, us.
The email (or How to Sound Like You Know What You’re Doing)
Sometimes I write an email and read it seven times before sending it. If I have to write it in English, I might let it marinate overnight just to be sure I have time to overthink. Now, I don’t overthink my emails because I don’t know what I want to say, but because I am trying to determine whether my sentences sound like something an intelligent person would write in English. There is a particular kind of “panic” involved in writing something as simple as I would be happy to discuss this further. Is it polite? Too polite? Is happy too happy? Is it desperate? Should it be I would be glad? Does discuss this further sound professional or like someone pretending to be professional?
This silly little email example is, in miniature, an apparatus of display. We don’t only speak or write to communicate information; we speak and write to make ourselves legible as competent. In the discourse of the so-called art world, English operates not simply as a language of communication but as a language of professional and social legitimacy. I don’t only write English to say something; I write it to appear as someone entitled to say it.
The anxiety around language isn’t always about whether I know enough English to communicate. It is about whether my English will successfully communicate me as someone educated, professional, articulate, internationally mobile, and culturally fluent enough to belong in the room. A wrong preposition, an awkward sentence, a comma in the wrong place, or an email that sounds “too simple” can suddenly feel like evidence of something much larger. Anxiety isn’t really a grammatical category, and language often becomes inseparable from it.
To write in English as a non-native is to enter a field where thought must first become displayable to exist. To write in English as a cultural worker is to be positioned within systems of critique, funding, and recognition that precede me. What cannot be articulated risks becoming invisible. This produces constant self-translation between meanings and between versions of acceptability. I revise not only for clarity but for survival, for entry, for staying inside. English is not only the language I am performing this labour in; it is the language I am attached to in a way closer to desire than choice. This attachment is affective and asymmetrical: I depend on English for visibility while experiencing it as the language in which I am most easily misread.
Now, I don’t actually want to appear to be a native speaker. What I used to want, increasingly, was more suspicious: I wanted to sound like someone who belongs in the room. These are not the same thing. Desire is the root of all suffering, or something like that, right?
But what happens when the display is no longer a text but your own body and voice? On the page, I can edit myself. I can move a comma, replace a word, delete a sentence, ask someone to read it before anyone else does. I can make my English look effortless because the labour happens somewhere else, in private. My body is less cooperative; my voice cannot be proofread before it enters the room. The problem is that I don’t want my English to announce where I come from before I have had the chance to say what I came to say. Nobody should think of my accent first and the content I deliver second. However, an already celebrated artist speaking with an accent can be perceived as charismatic, authentic, and cosmopolitan. A student speaking imperfect English can be perceived as unintelligent. The same linguistic difference can be displayed as sophistication or deficiency depending on who is speaking and who is looking. Consequently, the ultimate success of linguistic display would be that the speaker’s linguistic difference disappears. And that gives us a fantastic paradox: The better I become at displaying myself, the less visible the labour of becoming displayable becomes.
This is where Pierre Bourdieu becomes useful. In Sociology is a Martial Art, a documentary about his work, in the first few minutes of it, Bourdieu speaks about the linguistic insecurity as he experienced it himself while having to deliver a lecture in English, French being his mother tongue. Imagine, one of the most important sociologists was insecure about his English. Watching him describe this insecurity – «It’s terrifying to have such stage fright. My mouth is all dry. (…) It’s really terrible to be so nervous. That’s linguistic insecurity for you. It would have been different in French. But that’s life.» ( Sociology is a Martial Art, 2001, 0:02:05) – I recognised something familiar: the feeling that language has suddenly become visible on the body. In my case, it can take the form of a bead of sweat running down my forehead: small, embarrassing, impossible to ignore once I notice it.
An Artist Who Cannot Speak English Is No Artist and AI
An artist applying for funding, an exhibition seeking international visibility, a curator writing a press release, a researcher submitting an abstract – all these things pass through English. Before the work can be encountered, it has to become describable. Before it can become describable, it has to become grammatically acceptable. Before it can become grammatically acceptable, someone like me has to sit in front of a document and ask whether which should be that. I have started thinking of this as displayability too: an idea must exist in a form that can travel, and I can know exactly what I mean and still appear doubtful because my syntax is uncertain.
In 1994, Mladen Stilinović made a work whose title now reads almost like an accusation: An Artist Who Cannot Speak English Is No Artist. This statement is obviously absurd, but its absurdity depends on recognizing the power behind it. When this artwork was created, English was becoming a condition of international artistic visibility, and those who could not speak English were simply incapable of entering the systems through which contemporary art increasingly circulated. What interests me is the particular cruelty of it: it transforms a practical disadvantage into an ontological judgment. You don’t merely fail to speak English; you cease, institutionally, to qualify as an artist. Or a curator, an art writer, an intern, etc. Today, English is so deeply embedded that we have internalized it as a demand. Therefore, I depend on English for visibility while experiencing it as the language in which I am most easily misread.
For years, the ability to speak the language functioned as a form of symbolic capital because it was unevenly distributed. Some people inherited it through education, class, geography, family, and proximity to institutions. Now AI can produce at least the surface of fluency on demand. I can ask a machine to make my email sound more professional, more concise, more confident, more like someone who belongs. A strange feeling to have spent years learning how to sound like someone who belongs, and now I can outsource the performance. But, if AI can make everyone sound “fluent”, does linguistic capital become less valuable – or do we simply raise the linguistic bar again?
However, research from Stanford University shows that popular AI detectors falsely flag human-written essays by non-native English speakers as machine-generated over 61% of the time. Liang et al. (2023) found that GPT detectors exhibit significant bias. These tools are programmed to flag writing as AI-generated when they encounter simple sentences and a predictable word choice, which is how non-native speakers tend to write. Even if AI detectors aren’t trained to flag less complex writing, the tools learn to do so by knowing that AI-generated writing is less complex.
Perhaps we will only understand what AI has done to linguistic capital in retrospect.
International Art English
Anyhow, the art world is particularly dependent on linguistic performance because so much of artistic life happens through language. Artists and cultural workers are constantly required to explain, contextualize, justify, and translate their practices into forms legible to cultural institutions. Knowing how to sound like an artist, a curator, an academic, or an institutionally legible cultural worker is part of knowing how to participate in this game. This is why I can overthink that email before pressing send. The absurdity is that the person receiving the email most likely doesn’t notice any of this, and they might not even care. But for the person writing it, the stakes can feel enormous, because the email is not only carrying a message; it is carrying a social marker. So, perhaps the most unsettling form of linguistic insecurity is not the fear that I cannot speak English, but the fear that I cannot speak this English – the English that seems to belong naturally to the room everyone is trying to enter. So, we display ourselves through what we know, how we speak, how we write, and how easily we seem to move through the codes of a profession.
I have learned that this language also has a name; it’s called International Art English (IAE). I remember my first attempt at reading about IAE. My English was not bad. I had been a good student; I passed the national exam in English with the highest mark. But I did not know this language. It was the first time I realized that knowing English and knowing how to speak about contemporary art in English were two completely different things. Here’s a summary of that story:
In 2012, Alix Rule and David Levine published International Art English, basically saying: Have you noticed that everyone in contemporary art sounds like they swallowed a thesaurus? They looked at the peculiar English of biennials, galleries, press releases, curatorial statements, and art magazines, and pointed out that it had developed into a recognizable international dialect. Words like interrogate, negotiate, foreground, engage with, explore, discourse, situated, relational, practice began doing a lot of heavy lifting. Basically, an artwork no longer simply looks at migration. It interrogates the politics of displacement. An artist doesn’t make sculptures from old photographs. Their practice engages with questions of memory and representation. Something like that.
Rule and Levine’s point wasn’t only “Haha, art people mumbo jumbo.” They also argued that the internet had helped create a strange linguistic situation in which people all over the world could imagine that their writing might reach an international art audience. So even if an art student in Skopje was mostly writing to people in Skopje, she might as well write the announcement in IAE. To be more precise, they wrote:
«Those who have tried to account for contemporary art’s peculiar nonlocal language tend to see it as the Esperanto of this fantastically mobile and glamorous world, as a rational consensus arrived at for the sake of better coordination. But that is not quite right. Of course, if you’re curating an exhibition that brings art made in twenty countries to Dakar or Sharjah, it’s helpful for the artists, interns, gallerists, and publicists to be communicating in a common language. But convenience can’t account for IAE. Our guess is that people all over the world have adopted this language because the distributive capacities of the Internet now allow them to believe—or to hope—that their writing will reach an international audience. We can reasonably assume that most communication about art today still involves people who share a first language: artists and fabricators, local journalists and readers. But when an art student in Skopje announces her thesis show, chances are she’ll email out the invite in IAE. Because, hey – you never know.»
Well, hey, I am that art student in Skopje, disguised as a curator-writer-cultural worker in Zagreb! And a girl can hope!
Then, Hito Steyerl basically asked: yes, but who exactly are we laughing at? This strange English was not invented by some committee of evil curators. It was produced by the international art world itself, often by the people at the bottom of it: interns, assistants, artists, translators, precarious cultural workers, many of whom were writing in a language that was not their first. Steyerl’s response was not to return to proper English. She proposed making the contamination even more obvious, calling her version International Disco Latin (Steyerl 2013). Martha Rosler was also suspicious of the whole operation in her 2013 response titled English and All That. Press releases, after all, are not exactly spontaneous expressions of artistic genius. They are often institutional copy, written by whoever has been asked to produce way too many words by tomorrow morning.
Then, for some reason, everyone seemed to stop talking about it. And then AI arrived, suddenly making the old question feel very new again. Rule and Levine returned to the question in 2025 in a conversation aptly titled Language Against Intelligence, asking what remains of International Art English in the age of AI (Wu 2025). Their provocation was that perhaps IAE is already dead. The old press-release machinery has lost some of its centrality; the art world has moved into feeds, images, captions, fragments, and whatever else the internet has become since 2012.
Even if IAE is dead, the apparatus that produced it is not. It has simply learned to speak through another mouth.
So, I find myself somewhere in the middle. I have spent years learning this language precisely because I wanted to enter the world that produces it. I laughed at words that later entered my own mouth. IAE has contaminated even my mother tongue. I learned to understand the mumbo jumbo, and, worse, I learned to produce some of it myself. So IAE is ridiculous. IAE is useful. IAE can be exclusionary. It can also be the shared language through which people who do not share a first language manage to talk to one another.
This still matters because the contemporary art world is more international than ever. Artists and cultural workers are expected to apply for residencies in other countries, exhibit abroad, participate in international biennials, speak to curators from different contexts, write applications for institutions they have never visited, and make their work legible to audiences far beyond the place where it was produced. English is just the practical infrastructure through which much of this takes place. But this is what makes the pressure to sound competent so difficult to separate from the pressure to belong. We are not only learning how to speak to one another; we are learning how to make ourselves recognizable to one another. I am not particularly interested in deciding whether this language is good or bad, meaningful or meaningless. I am more interested in what it does.
And yes, maybe that email will travel, maybe the application will reach… someone? Maybe this small project will enter a larger network; probably it won’t. However, you never know is a strange kind of hope, almost impossible to cling to, but it is also one of the things that keeps the world moving.
How to French Kiss in English
Now, I don’t want to abolish English. This is what makes the relationship embarrassing. I complain about it and then spend my evenings reading in it. I curse the comma and then fall in love with a sentence. I resent the person who corrects me and secretly wish there was nothing to correct. I call English imperial and then use it to flirt, work, joke, gossip, read, watch television, write applications, and fall in love with people who live thousands of kilometres away. The language I experience as a demand is also the language I experience as possibility.
I don’t want to over-romanticize linguistic imperfection and propose it as the ultimate form of resistance. It can be fun and relaxing, but sometimes a missing comma is simply a missing comma. Still, something is interesting about the moment when language refuses to become completely transparent. A hesitation can reveal the speaker; an accent can reveal a geography. An awkward sentence can remind us that language is not neutral infrastructure but something embodied, learned, acquired, and negotiated. Broken English isn’t superior to “correct” English, but it can make visible the work that “proper” English is so good at hiding.
I like the image of French kissing as something intimate and slightly inefficient. There is no clean exchange of information, no correct syntax. There is saliva, hesitation, misdirection, interruption. Two mouths enter the same space and neither completely controls it. I like the idea of thinking of English this way. Not perfect. But with enough friction. Perhaps the goal is not to master English but to become intimate with it. I don’t think the answer is to leave the apparatus. I am not interested in purity, either linguistic or otherwise. There is no untouched language waiting somewhere outside English. Perhaps the only possibility is to remain close enough to the apparatus to use it, but not so close that it becomes impossible to write in English without disappearing into it; I can stay slightly foreign inside the sentence; I can lean into a kiss, but never so close that I forget there are two mouths.
This is a proposition for another relationship to language: not mastery, not perfect translation, not successful display, but proximity, messiness, playfulness, the awkward pleasure of getting close without becoming completely legible. It is to let syntax loosen, to let meaning linger slightly wet in the mouth, unfinished. It is to refuse clean articulation and stay inside the gap where language almost becomes touch.
Ps. I am writing in English because it is the only language that lets this work happen. It is also the language in which I am least convincing. The contradiction remains: to stay inside it, close enough to touch, never clean enough to disappear into display. And maybe I’m just a person being ridiculous about an email.
Bibliography
Liang W., Yuksekgonun M., Mao Y., Wu E., Zou J., GPT detectors are biased against non-native English writers, in «Patterns», vol. 4, n. 7, 2023. Available at LINK (Accessed: 25 August 2026).
Rosler M., English and All That, in «e-flux journal», n. 45, 2013. Available at LINK (Accessed: 25 August 2026).
Rule A., Levine D., International Art English, in «Triple Canopy», n. 16, 2012. Available at LINK (Accessed: 25 August 2026).
Sociology is a Martial Art, diretto da Pierre Carles, Icarus Films, New York, 2001. Available at LINK (Accessed: 25 August 2026).
Steyerl H., International Disco Latin, in «e-flux journal», n. 45, 2013. Available at LINK (Accessed: 25 August 2026).
Wu J., Is the Artworld Intelligent?, in «ArtReview», 3 dicembre 2025. Available at LINK (Accessed: 25 August 2026).
Antonela Solenički is a Zagreb-based curator working in contemporary art and culture. She holds an MA in Visual Arts and Curatorial Studies from NABA Milan and a BA in Art History and Spanish Language and Literature from the University of Zagreb. Her practice focuses on independent curatorial work, exhibition-making, and research-based projects. She publishes essays, reviews, and interviews on VoxFeminae, Kulturpunkt, and Portal Novosti.