Call The Scribe continues Bergman’s work around language and abstraction, examining how human agency is transformed through technical mediation. Two viewers are invited to read out a scripted conversation cued via subtitles in a zoom meeting. The rest of the viewers become the audience to this conversation. Through the negotiation with the text on the spot, the work brings into question control over one’s voice together with the strange experience of not understanding what you’re saying until after you’ve said it. Through written text, language becomes independent of its speakers. The audience sees double: the faces on the screen and the faces in front of them, the character in the script and the character of the passing actor, the written and spoken texts.

The doubling of the message reoccurs in the Drawn Again series. Since 2016, whenever someone draws her a diagram or a visual example in a conversation, Bergman asks them to draw it again. Presenting the two side by side shows the drawing being transformed from a tool to a fetish; the artist becomes suddenly aware of it as an object to be looked at. In the case of the Nixon caricature, the second drawing shows less likeness to Nixon, as if the fifty-year-old childhood memory corroded immediately once it was exposed to light.

Proposal to Start Over and Be Right Back present a mirror image of a happy ignorance of sorts. These works come through a gleeful refusal of language, a yearning to abandon legibility and return to a baby-like existence.