Melissa Joseph • no words • 02.05.–07.06.2025
Soy Capitan is pleased to announce no words, the gallery’s first collaboration with New York-based artist Melissa Joseph, presented on the occasion of Gallery Weekend Berlin (May 2–4).
The exhibition marks a significant moment in Joseph’s career as her first solo presentation in Europe. Known for her needle felted tableaus, often embedded in found or handmade objects, Joseph draws on imagery from her personal archive, creating “cocoons of memory” that preserve meaningful moments from her life as well as those around her.
For no words, Joseph took inspiration from an ongoing conversation with acclaimed poet Megan Fernandes about the precarious nature of language and visibility in light of contemporary erasures. Fernandes’ poem Discipline – commissioned for the exhibition – serves as an entry point for Joseph’s newest body of work. Discipline addresses the overwhelming influx of media, the fragmentation of truth, and the tension between correctness and personal agency. The poem reflects on Dante’s Inferno, describing hell as a spiral rather than a straight line, a place where confession becomes inevitable and judgment is ever-present. “Hell is a funnel, a crater bombed out by Lucifer’s fall from heaven. But mostly, it is not a straight line, you can’t drop into it. You must stroll,” writes Fernandes. Joseph connects deeply with these ideas, considering what it means to be “correct(ed),” to navigate systems of control, and to find space for truth amid distortion.
Joseph often alludes to literature. Her works and many of the titles in no words respond to themes and questions posed in the poem, specifically censorship and movement within restricted spaces. One line of Fernandes’ poem deeply affected the artist, who knew she wanted to alter viewers’ ability to move freely through the gallery space, but wasn’t sure how. Then she read “Scouring the shores of judgement, red tails of chopped creatures litter the beach. We pick them up and say, this used to be a life? But…” She understood immediately that her works would litter the floor, like remnants left after a storm.
Drawing from both her own archive and the poem’s imagery, Joseph examines the ways in which words and ideas are reclaimed, rebranded, and rendered inaccessible. Working in New York and Berlin and incorporating found objects from both, the artist enlists site as an accomplice in her examinations, allowing the works to evolve in direct response to their surroundings.
