Harlem House Gallery presented Yellow Spaghetti, an improvised performance by effie bowen and Asia Stewart on May 1, 2026.

Taking Han Kang's literary exploration of the middle voice as its curatorial inspiration, it draws on the artists' shared experience of speech therapy—at once a corrective institution and an embodied form—as its point of departure. Where the 2nd-century Greek grammarian Apollonius Dyscolus viewed the middle voice as an inflection suspended between active and passive constructions, Han Kang recast it as an ontological state: silence not as absence, but as active response to ruptures that resist articulation. Rather than treating language as a neutral vehicle of expression, the performance stages rotating roles that split speech and movement across the ground floor of a Harlem brownstone, positioning them as vertebrae for a social choreography in which communication is imposed, withheld, and refused.

The performance unfolded over the course of an evening through improvisations by effie bowen and Asia Stewart.