Exhibition opening on 12 September‘Everything is Connected through Atmospheres of Unreadability’

11 September 2023

Photo: UHH/Esfandiari

This autumn, Axel Malik turns the SUB Hamburg into ‘The Feverish Library’. In our interview, he talks about the impact of art in public spaces and why libraries are the ideal environment for his unreadable signs.

Dieses Interview ist auch auf Deutsch erschienen.

For two months, the users of the SUB will see your signs every day when entering the building and come across them again in various places within it. Does art have a different effect if we encounter it in everyday places instead of in a gallery? And why do you often choose the former for your work?

Art that we encounter in places outside the exhibition system can open up other perceptions. By entering into a relationship with the space and its functions, it creates a tension. Art can unfold its communicative potential of friction and confrontation very well in public and dynamic zones of work, life, and learning. One can approach art in a very individual way and repeatedly experience it at different distances and moments. This allows for a wide range of perspectives and more subtle processes of reflection.

Since my project is about writing, I want to initiate dialogue in places that have a high communicative charge of their own. For example, the two revolving doors at the entrance play an important role in my installation in the SUB. An incidental and purely functional process – entering or leaving the library – takes on a special meaning because body-sized signs that form a counterpart are involved in the movement. And both show a different side when coming in and going out.

You have created installations in many well-known libraries before, for example in Berlin and Weimar, most recently in the Thuringian University and State Library. What keeps you returning to libraries?

At first glance, libraries – understood as cultural repositories which consist of distinct, readable, typographically unambiguous signs – seem like the most unsuitable space for unreadable signs and atmospheres of unreadability. But in fact, the opposite is the case.

Handwritten traces in the form of unreadable but not illegible signs can open up unexplored horizons of writing. They expose the intensity, breadth, and force of complex and filigree cascades of movement that never repeat themselves in their individual, uncontrolled form. In this way, signs that step out of their typographic confinement point to an unbelievably differentiated capacity and seismographic potential of the writing movement itself.

I am also attracted to libraries because they reveal not only what writing means but also what it may become. Essentially, I am proposing to expand the concept of writing to include the uncontrolled auto-poetic affects of the writing movement. What places could be better suited to introduce this proposal into cultural discourse than libraries?