The online campaign qwx-show ur lingua aims to bring together pictures of people sticking out their tongues in an act of resistance and self assertion on the website qwx2009.org.

The act of sticking out one’s tongue, universally an act of provocation and disobedience, is thus combined with the specific claim of minorities in Turkey for education in their mother tongue and an institutional recognition of their languages. By showing one’s tongue, one’s speech organ, what is silent becomes visible: the inner voice of the own “otherness”

The “qwx-show ur lingua” project as an artistic intervention launches an attack on society with the aim of rendering the self-denying disciplinary techniques useless. “qwx – show ur lingua” offers the minorities an opportunity for action via artistic attack (influencing image-building within political processes). This action is based on the logic of ambivalence and “turning things inside out or upside down.”

The sticking out of the tongue turns things into carnivalesque: demanded obedience is turned into an emblem of disobedience, acquired immaturity becomes ill-bred childishness, and although the language ban is consciously adhered to (no word is spoken) self-denying expectations are at the same time nonverbally challenged! The language of humor, with its nonchalance and its playful joy, renders the official system , which controls everyday life with its prohibitions and its nationalistic seriousness, temporarily powerless.

March 2009