Press Release
LANGUAGE/TEXT/IMAGE
MAIN SPACE | October 20, 2024, to February 16, 2025

The exhibition LANGUAGE/TEXT/IMAGE focuses on the central role of language, text, and image, which are essential means of expression in human communication and the creation of meaning. The show is dedicated to the question of where the boundaries lie between what can be said or seen and what can be said or shown.

Mechanisms of Inclusion and Exclusion
Selected works of art from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries examine the relationship between language, text, and image, as well as the related possibilities for making something sayable, visible, and audible. These works reveal mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion and offer scope for appropriation and the transfer of meaning. They question the human need to be heard and seen, and highlight how this is conveyed through language, text, and image. Meaning is created, stabilized, and also changed through language, text, and images. The latter mark affiliations to groups and exclude others. In other words, meaning is not simply found—it is created. 

New Spaces of Meaning
The thirteen selected artists take on the challenge of working with something that is initially situational, unstable, and difficult to control. In their sound- and text-based, photographic, printmaking, filmic, or textile works, they do not work against established conventions, but use them to create new spaces of meaning. In so doing, the artists explore practices of reading and seeing, the interweaving of memory and history, and the boundaries between fact and fiction. At the same time, they question entrenched patterns of perception and give space to the representation of uncertainties and misunderstandings.

Power and Complexity
LANGUAGE/TEXT/IMAGE invites visitors to explore the power and complexity of language, text, and image—and to reflect on how they are used in art. The artists emphasize that history(ies) and (hi)stories must be understood as something that has evolved historically, that has been created as a result of shared experiences and hence is also subject to change.

Artists
John Baldessari (1931–2020), Maria Bartuszová (1936–96), Alice Bidault (*1994), Alejandro Cesarco (*1975), Ayşe Erkmen (*1949), Nadine Fecht (*1976), Gary Hill (*1951), Janice Kerbel (*1969), Gabriel Kladek (1941–2023), National AIDS Memorial Quilt, Gordon Parks (1912–2006), Markus Vater (*1970), Gillian Wearing (*1963)