Art

The Broken Speaker

Nina Thomas

Attributes

Nina Thomas' practice explores captioning as a medium. In The Broken Speaker (2026), a silent film, her captions destabilise the categories often assigned to descriptions of sound and voice, exploring the subjective, material, bodily and social – all through a deaf lens.

She considers captioning a practice of deepening attention and listening. She chooses to caption breath and hesitations, which a captioner might omit. For Nina, these moments hold significance. Rather than breaks or failures of speech, breath occupies the space between us. Nina makes such moments legible, an act of open captioning that searches for moments of shared understanding.

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About the artist

Nina Thomas is profoundly deaf, and for over a decade has worked to advocate for change in the cultural sector, working with cultural venues to improve accessibility. She was a trustee of the charity Stagetext, a founding member of The Film Bunch (a deaf and hard-of-hearing film organisation). As an artist, Nina has exhibited at venues such as LUX, British Ceramics Biennial, The Crypt Gallery (NW1), Liberty Festival 2022, Tate Exchange (Tate Modern, London) and OVADA (Oxford).

Café installation
A site-specific installation commissioned for our café space.

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