The Art of Writing

30 May 2023

An unusual programme, an unusual venue: ‘Beyond Visualising Language’ at Deichtorhallen Hamburg brought together researchers of the Cluster and artists working with the medium of script. Impressions of two intensive days.

Karsten Helmholz

On 11 and 12 May, the auditorium of Deichtorhallen Hamburg turned into an experimental site. The set-up included six artists and 14 scholars, plus a diverse audience consisting of members of the university and the general public. They gathered for an event that was at the same time an academic conference and an exhibition, featuring performances, panel discussions, and artist talks. The aim of the unusual format was to give life to the idea that is at the very heart of the Cluster’s Artists in Residence programme: to build a bridge between analytical and artistic approaches to writing.

With Axel Malik, Timo Nasseri, and Mirko Reisser (DAIM), all current and previous Artists in Residence were part of ‘Beyond Visualising Language’. They were joined by the Philip Loersch, Dagmara Kraus and the Georgian calligrapher David Maisuradze. While all of these artists write, even a cursory glance at their work immediately reveals that the width of the spectrum is dazzling. David Maisuradze’s works celebrate a calligraphic tradition that even in Georgia exists mostly at the periphery (he runs the country’s only school of calligraphy). Axel Malik’s ‘scriptal method’ has made unreadbility the defining feature of his writing: not a single one of his millions of signs, created in a writing process lasting over thirty years, exists twice. In contrast, Mirko Reisser has been spraying the same four letters over and over again for 30 years: DAIM. But this limitation does not detract in the least from the complexity and rich variety of his pieces.