Ian Skedd: Sign Singing

Additional Information

Ian Skedd’s Sign Singing, Love Will Tear Us Apart, Joy Division 1979, Deaf Choir 2009 challenges our understanding of what constitutes the experience and meaning of music and musical performance. In the video, twelve performers, recruited through Vancouver's Western Institute for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing, perform Joy Division’s  Love Will Tear Us Apart in American Sign Language (ASL). None of the performers have heard the song, but have, working together, translated the lyrics to ASL and memorized them as part of their commitment to the project In conceptualizing, facilitating, and documenting this performance, Skedd reminds us how that the mainstream defines, conceives, and limits the world in ways which do not literally and conceptually speak for everyone.

Ian Skedd is a multidisciplinary artists working with installation, intervention, performance, sound, and video. After getting a Cecil Lewis Sculpture scholarship, he moved to London, England, to complete an MFA at Chelsea College of Art and Design. Skedd is currently based in Vancouver, BC.

Ian Skedd, Sign Singing: Love Will Tear Us Apart, Joy Division, 1979, Deaf Choir, 2009, 2009, video. Photo by Scott Massey.