Seeing Words, Reading Images

The exhibition opens with Lawrence Weiner’s installation THE GRACE OF A GESTURE (2010). Weiner, who has been regarded as a pioneer of conceptual art since the late 1960s, demonstrates how the traditional separation of writing and image, literature and artwork can be overcome and how an entire place can be incorporated into an artwork through a reduced gesture. This creates a temporary, conceptual form of poetry and communication. 

Karin Sander’s work wordsearch gives its name to the first section. The project, a “translinguistic sculpture,” initiated by Deutsche Bank in 2002, she translated all the languages spoken in New York City into a lexical, poetic artwork published in The New York Times. The connection between concept and poetry is also evident in Herta Müller’s word collages and the lyrical leporellos of poet and artist Etel Adnan. 

The “Ulysses” section addresses forms of storytelling, for example, in the surreal homage to James Joyce by Marcel Dzama, in the donkey monument dedicated to the folk hero, buffoon, and moral critic Molla Nasreddin by the art collective Slavs and Tatars, and in Yinka Shonibare’s library sealed with wax cloth. 

“Map of Utopia” is dedicated to artistic counter-designs to historical cartography. In his animated video work Anti-Mercator (2010–2011), William Kentridge shows how scientific surveying can become an instrument of colonial power. Similarly, Qiu Zhijie undertakes the paradoxical attempt, through his project Mapping the World, to translate as much as possible into map form, creating, for example, artistically inked sheets depicting false prophets, historical losers, and past or future utopias. 

In the section “The Home of My Eyes,” the theme is home and exile. It is named after a portrait series photographed in 2015 by Shirin Neshat. For this project, she interviewed fifty-five people from Azerbaijan, a country where different ethnicities, religions, and languages converge, about their feelings of home. The responses are associated with uprooting, loss, and grief. They were translated into Farsi and then written calligraphically over the portraits like a gossamer fabric. 

The “Small Right Hand Down” section addresses democracy and human rights. This is evident in the work of Wong Hoy Cheong, for example in the series Study for Colonies Bite Back (2010), in which colonial literature is offered to a swarm of termites to be consumed. It is also present in Jenny Holzer’s Redaction Paintings (2005–2008), which are based on heavily redacted US government documents concerning war crimes that were released after the Iraq War. 

The final section, “Seelenfenster,” leads into the world of gesture. In the installation of the same name by Rebecca Horn, image, writing, drawing, poetry, and spatial installation merge into one another. Her works are often described as “ciphers,” poetic signs that create a magical atmosphere. Her oeuvre explores the dissolution of boundaries between body, machine, and space. The abstracted calligraphic forms in the 1972 paintings by Hossein Zenderoudi are similarly transcendent. In the modern calligraphy of Shiryū Morita, writing and signs become gestural images that we can intuitively “read.”