Can a gesture be a word?

"Word Event" looks at a select group of artists who carry on a tradition of subversive methodology in their practice and attitude.

"Word Event" is a multi-level cross-sectioned exhibition of contemporary works, events, performances and informances, scores, printed matter and film. Taking George Brecht's "Word Event" (1961), a handwritten Event Card, and James Lee Byars' "The Golden Hole for Speech (The Perfect Whisper)" (1974/1981), an abstract invitation for speech, as its starting points, the exhibition attempts to displace itself by purposely seeking out confrontation and synchronization thus landing in the exhibition space as an active dialogue. "Word Event" points to a possible return of a fluxus sensibility via a new, contemporary, proverbial linguistic turn.

Artists today - or more precisely, "cultural producers" - are reactivating a language based and, specifically, narrative based practice. Creating room for conversation and leveling the hierarchy of production between sketch, thought and product, this linguistic turn approaches the surface of the metaphorical page as an "exchange surface", "as a space of shift between different mediums, in which, as Rancière puts it, "signs become forms and forms become acts."" (Quoted from ‘The Space of Words' by Christophe Gallois, Metropolis M, nr 2, 2008, who cites Rancière's L'Espace des mots, Musée des Beaux-Arts de Nantes, 2005, p. 13, translation by Christophe Gallois)

Works by the artists in "Word Event" contain an active "displacement" (or exchange) between word and image, the narrative and the picture, which occurs on many levels, in different media - from the more ephemeral to the concrete, as rumours, scripts, instructions, lectures, posters, objects and a seance. A sculpture turns into a conversation, a lecture into a series of posters, the unassuming viewer into a story; he receives directives by photographs, listens to a score purposefully mirrored while gambling to new rules under the watchful eyes of the Jack of Spades. Word Event is the happy hijacking of space by language where installations, film, the stage, the book and sound live together in one converged setting.

This exhibition has been generously supported by: Annemarie Burckhardt