“Sometimes we hear what our fears allow us to hear.” Taus Makhacheva says the emotion is one of the defining qualities of gossip.
It rarely passes cleanly from one person to another. It is absorbed through fear, desire, suspicion and excitement, changing slightly with every body it enters.
That unstable journey sits at the centre of And What Did You Say?, the Russian artist’s July performances and the remaining installation at the UAE Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. Built around three performers, a bench, an audio work and a collection of unusual objects, the piece gives physical form to something usually invisible.
“What fascinated me was that gossip is a whisper that can produce completely opposite realities,” Makhacheva says. “It can create safe spaces by warning you about politics that don’t align with yours, or about a toxic work environment. On the other hand, it can destroy reputations and careers through false accusations.”
The work appears in Washwasha, the pavilion exhibition curated by Bana Kattan with assistant curator Tala Nassar. Taking its title from the Arabic word for whispering, the exhibition explores forms of communication that sit beyond official language and records.
Makhacheva began thinking of gossip as an unofficial language of society, as well as the art world.
Her initial interest, however, was in the body’s response to fear. Working with researcher Ksenia Skorytchenko, the artist looked at the fight, flight and freeze responses, particularly the paralysis that can follow a threat or trauma.
Gossip can provoke its own physical reaction. It may release dopamine, linked to excitement and the feeling of having suddenly understood something. It can also trigger the release of cortisol, producing fear and stress when the rumour concerns you or someone close to you.
The performance follows that movement through three characters: Source, Spread and Core.
Source considers where gossip comes from and what responsibility belongs to the person who receives it. The performer wears a suit covered in zipped pockets, taking out empty envelopes and handing them to the audience.
The envelopes offer no information. Instead, Makhacheva says, they ask visitors to consider their own agency.
“What is your relationship to gossip? How do you engage with it?” she says. “In a way, they’re invisible mirrors that ask you to look back at yourself.”
The character also unfolds what the artist calls an “un-mirror” from inside a bench. Its surface is opaque and offers no reflection.
Makhacheva connects it to the effect of false accusations, which can make a person question their own integrity until they can no longer see themselves clearly.
Spread follows what happens once gossip leaves its origin. Her costume has multiple sleeves and necklines, and is continually rearranged during the performance, refusing to settle into one stable identity.
Every person changes gossip, Makhacheva says, whether consciously or unconsciously.
At one point, Spread appears almost completely still. The performer is asked to imagine gossip entering through the ear, moving into the amygdala deep inside the brain, before passing through into the chest, then travelling into the feet before leaving the body.
Makhacheva describes it as “micro choreography”. Rather than performing outwards, the dancer was told to imagine the audience as her internal organs.
Spread carries a cabinet containing three vessels. Two are blown glass, while the third resembles porcelain but is edible. During the performance, she bites into it and swallows.
The gesture makes the work’s central metaphor literal. Gossip changes as it moves through a person, just as the vessel changes when it is ingested.
The glass objects are uneven, as though trying to recover an earlier form. Their design grew from Makhacheva’s thoughts about jewellery collected from Soviet republics, including Dagestan, during the Second World War. While exceptional pieces entered museums, many others were melted down for silver.
She began imagining what those objects might look like if they could remember what they had once been.
“For me, that is also what gossip does,” she says. “It changes shape every time it passes through another mouth.”
The final character, Core, has learnt to metabolise gossip.
She moves through anger, shame, fear and judgment, but is no longer controlled by them. During the performance, she gradually removes the layers of her costume until she is left in a simple shirt.
Those layers represent everything that has accumulated around a person. What remains is a state Makhacheva describes as “post-rage, post-anger, post-judgment, post-shame, post-everything”.
Core carries several objects that Makhacheva calls instruments rather than props.
One is a crooked pipe with a tongue-like surface, based on architectural devices known as the Lord’s Ear, built into Scottish castle walls so conversations could be secretly overheard.
Another is a bracelet resembling a pair of melted scissors. It was inspired by 16th-century Russian folklore's depiction of Evil Rumour as a figure covered in eyes, tongues, arrows and cutting tools. Here, the scissors have lost the ability to wound.
A chain made from brass adzuki beans refers to the Japanese mythological figure Azuki Arai, whose bean-washing sounds lure people towards water. The whispering sound remains, but its purpose is transformed from destructive to generative.
The choreography was developed collaboratively with Rei Kassandra Co, Salvatore De Simone and Anna Abalikhina, who came from different generations, locations and choreographic traditions.
Makhacheva says the performers became co-creators, contributing movements, prompts and structural decisions. Gestures began moving between them. Salvatore’s anxious leg movement appeared in Rei’s section. Anna’s face-pinching gesture later surfaced in Salvatore’s.
The performers jokingly called it theft. Makhacheva saw migration.
“Gestures travelled between bodies in exactly the same way gossip travels between people, changing slightly every time,” she says.
That idea also shapes how audiences encounter the piece. There is no fixed theatrical beginning or end. Visitors can enter midway, leave, return or overhear only fragments.
“In a way, the choreography too behaved like gossip,” Makhacheva says.
When the performance is not taking place, the work changes state. Visitors can sit on the Gossip Bench and listen through headphones to three overlapping voices.
One is an overheard conversation that seems to move through the pavilion. Another is an inner monologue. The third is a narrator moving between history, biology and culture.
The bench is painted almost the same colour as the gallery walls, but one shade different. Its fabric carries the pattern of the cochlea, the spiral structure of the inner ear, while small metal legs make it resemble an insect that has crawled into the pavilion and disguised itself as furniture.
At certain moments, people seated at opposite ends are asked to look at each other and open parts of the bench together. Listening becomes a shared act.
Makhacheva says her practice often involves “changing the volume on things” and making certain conversations more audible.
Gossip, in this work, is never presented as simply harmful or harmless. It protects and wounds, connects and isolates, clarifies and distorts. Its force lies in its ability to preserve multiple versions of events, along with the fears and desires surrounding them.
“History often wants to be singular,” Makhacheva says. “Gossip allows the multiple.”
The And What Did You Say? installation is at the UAE National Pavilion at Venice Biennale until November 22
