Maneli Aygani, Jeweled Dagger, 2012. Silent, 2:32

The sound of language is silent in this chain of clandestine conversations. Silence is a tactic to outplay speech and its oppressions, intimidations, the dangers of speaking — the warning is composed in the end as the images of women’s faces fill-in the cutout of a dagger. Silence is a weapon, as is speech. Barthes comments that “in every “totalitarian” or “totalizing” society, the implicit is a crime, because the implicit is a thought that escapes power” – the right to remain silent. But the women in the video do not appear to be silent, they are whispering to each other — their words are but rumors, or truths that are not public.  Rumor=sound; paradoxically, their silenced voices suggest sound, transforming private into public.