SEMANTIC VIOLENCE WALL

Various

Violence in language

This installation displays a selection of crowd-sourced words and phrases that conceal violence within euphemistic language, or whose literal violence is overlooked or forgotten in favour of their acquired meanings. In his book Violence(2008), the philosopher Slavoj Žižek refers to semantic violence as the “relations of social domination reproduced in our habitual speech forms”. Even language itself, he argues, could be considered violent in the way it structures our ability to think and communicate.