"Artworks have neither a beginning nor an end – they hover suspended in the imagination, open to review and interrogation."

Inside Stories traces Ian Carr-Harris’ longstanding examination of how meaning is constructed through language, presenting his 1982 ‘performance’ work in German alongside a new body of work. Though distinct in their source material, these works all investigate how words have the ability to order and produce thought, and how the structures of language guide action.

Inside Stories examines articles that continue from the front page to the interior pages of a newspaper, bringing the reader into contact with realities distinct from their own and outside of the subjects of mass attention. As such, the newspaper is at once a familiar, everyday object, and a repository of the distant and unknown. Inside Stories can also be interpreted as referring to the latent or hidden elements of a narrative which allow the reader’s subjectivity to inform and shape the text. In this way, readers are implicated in the constant renewal and reinvention of stories.

in German is operated by the viewer to play a recording of an amateur recitation of Heinrich Heine’s poem Die Lorelei -- a foundational text taught to German schoolchildren. The poem relays the story of a siren whose song leads seafarers to their deaths, and was later set to music in interpretations by composers Franz Liszt and Robert Schumann. Heine’s name was also removed from the text during the Nazi period in Germany, and, at one point, his work was banned entirely.

in German presupposes a shared space between artist and viewer as a necessary condition for the song to be both performed and received, considering performance as the basis of storytelling. The work also reflects the iterative process of learning, and the contingent relationship between author and reader, teacher and student, or performer and audience.

The tension between text and image as a site of meaning construction is an enduring interest of Carr-Harris’ work, mediated through previous explorations of encyclopedias, dictionaries, books of knowledge, and now newspapers. The articles in Inside Stories span across decades and vary widely in their scope, and Carr-Harris revisits these texts as he does his own work: seeing them not as fixed in time, but rather as opportunities for revision, reinterpretation, and reinvention.