Compliance is a poetic examination of how trauma reverberates through the years. A voice speaks, sometimes sings, sometimes fails to say. It is trying to address the points at which various confusions meet and link, in an articulated chain, or a ripple. When a discussion of trauma isn’t centred on its origin, the aftermath can play out. Here, the water facilitates a looking across time, mirrors and windows, as well as gaps and blank spots. A sort of portal, upon which bodily evidence materialises. The voice is sense-making, it maps and unpicks, it looks to teenagers, to suburbia, to middle England, to queer futures, to healing. Compliance exists both as a kind of haunting, and as a means of dealing with being haunted.
Iona Roisin (b.1989) is a British artist living and working in Helsinki. Her practice is centred around text, which operates as the binding element throughout. Perhaps the most distinct connecting theme within them is the insufficiency of language. What escapes or defies words? How to work within these limitations? Roisin has shown work in London, Helsinki, Zagreb, Seoul, St. Petersburg and Tallinn.