Modern Art is pleased to announce Where the tongue slips it speaks truth, Linder's fourth exhibition with the gallery. This exhibition follows closely on from Danger Came Smiling her celebrated retrospective at the Hayward Gallery, London, which is currently on tour at Glynn Vivian Art Gallery, Swansea. Linder is widely known for her work across photography, performance, textiles, video and sculpture. For this exhibition Linder focuses on photomontage, the medium she is most internationally known for. 2026 marks fifty years since Linder first used a Swann-Morton medical grade scalpel to cut out magazine images to skewer our accepted and prevailing understanding of representation and gender politics. As throughout her career, the photomontages in this exhibition probe the subjects of commodification, sexualisation and cultural value.

The exhibition is built around Greek mythology and the mythologisation of everyday figures. In a new body of work, porcelain figurines are overlaid on top of images of French New Wave actor Brigitte Bardot. The inanimate objects hold Bardot in a game of equivalence, where Bardot becomes frozen in time, alongside these shiny ornaments. In a separate series of photomontages based on Book X of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Linder reflects on Myrrha’s change from woman to tree as a means to escape the advances of her incestuous father Cinyras. Here, Linder combines appropriated pornographic photographs with images from catalogues of Roman sculpture, to stage a stark encounter between sex and power. Recently Linder has started working with professional footballer Miguel Azeez, as both subject and collaborator - here the artist and athlete meet in the zone where music, art and sport overlaps.

In another group of works images of Ancient Greek statues and busts are juxtaposed with 20th-century domestic objects, bringing the mythological into the everyday, a recurring trope throughout her career. In other examples Linder obfuscates the faces of classical statues with enamel paint, their familiar gazes awakened from centuries of fixity. With a process of automatism, Linder utilises what Ithell Colquhoun refers to as ‘mantic stain-making’ to access what’s hidden underneath the surface of the somatic body. Where the tongue slips it speaks truth continues Linder’s longstanding examination of how we process the visual world. The intuitive and reconstructive processes involved in the making of these works expand our perception of the present through the past.