Joe Nanashe

Joe Nanashe’s videos, photographs, and drawings explore the corporeal effects of languages and actions, using monotonous repetition to alter the perception of words and gestures and question their relation to contexts. His 2007 film Internet Alphabet captures a cursor scrolling through categories of pornography on the Internet. An automated voice reads the words highlighted by the cursor: “College,” “German,” “Limousine,” “Police,” in a disaffected electronic tone. In all of his work, he probes the notion that words and bodies are empty vessels that can be easily manipulated to different ends. “These words are meant to change you. To shape you,” Nanashe has said. “I want to make you different than you were. Communication implies a need to control, to inform, to shape.”