universal tongue

Universal Tongue was created through an extensive research of dance found footage conducted by Anouk Kruithof along with an international team of 52 researchers. For the project’s purposes 8 800 videos were collected from YouTube, Facebook and Instagram, summing up to 250 hours of video material presenting a variety of dance videos from different social and cultural contexts of the globe, showcasing viral phenomena and social media trends.  The collected footage has been described by each researcher, who categorised in total over 1000 dance styles from all 196 countries of the world.

Universal Tongue was set as an art project, which highlights fluidity, hybridity and interconnectedness of the modern digital era while honouring and celebrating the diverse historical and cultural backgrounds of the researched dances. In 2018, Kruithof created the centerpiece of Universal Tongue – an 8-channel video installation, presented at Medialab during the Cinekid Festival in Amsterdam commissioned by the curator Ward Janssen. The installation is rhythmically arranged using a unified soundtrack remixed with music samples from the found footage, creating an immersive audiovisual environment for the audience of four hours duration. The videos create an ongoing dance flow of looped moving images, where dance is presented as a form of an embodied knowledge of cultural identity, self-expression, fun and empowerment. Art work’s immersive character is said to invoke a blur between categories of the world order, such as country, continent or culture of dance contexts – highlighting global interconnectedness of human expression and digital culture. The installation displays over 1,000 dance styles, comprising 32 hours of footage in total. In addition to the 8-channel installation, Universal Tongue also exists as a single-channel video edition created in 2022 and there is a website and a book available.

The 8 channel version of Universal Tongue had among others solo presentations in Viernulvier (formerly Vooruit) in Ghent Belgium in 2021, in Museum Tinguely, Basel Switzerland in 2022/2023, in Kunsthal Rotterdam in the Netherlands in 2024 and in Bundeskunsthalle Bonn in Germany in 2024/2025. In 2022, the installation was part of Biennale für aktuelle Fotografie at Port 25 in Mannheim and part of WHOLE United Queer Festival, Orangerie Ferropolis in Germany.

The 8 channel installation is in the permanent collection of Museum Folkwang Essen Germany and Museum voorlinden, Wassenaar, the Netherlands.

The single channel video of Universal Tongue was, among various others, shown in Mercerie, Brussels, Belgium, Le Confort Moderne, Poitiers, France and part of De-mold at Contemporaryistanbul, Istanbul, Turkey, part of Tulca Festival of Visual Arts, Galway, Ireland and part of Biennale of Digital Imagination Chroniques at Friche la Belle de Mai, Marseille, France

The single channel video of Universal Tongue is in the permanent collection, among others, of Frac Alsace, Alsace, France, Museum Het Nieuwe Domein, Sittard, The Netherlands, De Nederlandsche Bank (DNB), Amsterdam, The Netherlands and BERG contemporary (Ingibjôrg Jonsdottir) Reykjavík, Island.

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