Ayşe Erkmen

Welcome to the impressive mural Typed Types, where Turkish-German artist Ayşe Erkmen plays with the form and typography of texts. At first glance, the letters are difficult to decipher because they are composed exclusively of a typewriter’s special characters and vary in size. They repeat the sentence “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog”. This phrase appears meaningless at first – that’s because it doesn’t need to make sense; it is an example of a dummy text or placeholder. Such texts are used in publishing when the actual content is not yet available, to test how a font looks in the final print. A dummy text must include every letter of the alphabet – in this case, the Latin alphabet. Once we know what to look for, the words suddenly become recognisable. Erkmen encourages us to reflect on the importance of context, prior knowledge, cultural background and the particular situation in decoding written texts.

Ayşe Erkmen created this mural specifically for this exhibition, and it will not survive once the exhibition closes – it is inseparably linked to this space. This emphasises once again how language and text are closely tied to their spatial context and how they depend on the observer’s background knowledge. By repeating the text again and again, in various sizes, Ayşe Erkmen also invites us to consider the relationship between individual sentences and letters, prompting us to reflect on our perception of text and image.