Echoes and Inscriptions

Art and Script in the Works of Artists in the Black Atlantic

2023–2025

RFC09

Writing on the surface, words that ask, words that lie on top of each other, words and letters that make very much out of little: the black ‘us’ in Adam Pendleton's work on the cover of ARTFORUM, which was sprayed over with an ‘us’ in white colour and thus oscillates between the upper and the lower form, becomes a tipping figure, which is ‘us’ – all of us – in black and at the same time ‘us’ in white. The short word can also be read as a shortened ‘USA’, in black and white. With these two colours, two layers and two letters, the artist reflects and stages a whole range of implications and associations, using script and meaning to stimulate abstract thinking.

Like Adam Pendleton, there are several other artists using the abstraction and at the same time the referentiality of script in their works. Focusing on the Black Atlantic, the French Caribbean artist Thierry Alet inscribes his works in the space of the gallery using walls and floors as his surface, challenging our visual and corporal relation to the script, the text, and the reading. In his series ‘The colors of words’, Wosene Worke Kosrof from Ethiopia uses the Amharic syllabus alphabet and transforms the signs into visual language that can be understood internationally – as he explains himself. With the series ‘Lambeaux’, Gilles Elie dit Cosaque makes writing part of a multimedia collage, creating an endless diary of creolité. The confrontation of handwritten and printed text in Clarissa Slighs ‘Reading Dick and Jane with me’ creates a space of dialogue between an authoritative text in print and an ‘individual’ relecture.

The writing and re-writing in artistic works is taking up traditions of calligraphy, the gesture of the brush becoming the medium of artistic expression – challenging legibility, concepts of text and image, but also the experience and expectations of the observer/reader. The materiality of writing stands next to the performance of the writing act – literary concepts as citation, palimpsests, and paratexts become allusions, references, and artistic instruments. Script as artwork, the intertwining of text and image, is thus a multifaceted reflection on the act of writing, the act of citing, creating intertemporal dialogues with literature and history, authors, and artists. In the activities of artists of the Black Atlantic, script and historical materials often become visual formulations of the re-negotiation of history and historiography, acting between archive art and reflections of historical blind spots or mono-perspective narratives.

The artworks considered in this project offers the possibility to ask how the choice of integrating writing and script into the composition affects the meaning, reading, and agency of the work. The concept of citation and restaging of texts, but also other historical material in the artworks, imposes the question of changing contexts and their consequences for the materials but also the effect of these materials becoming artworks. Especially in the works of artists of the Black Atlantic, the works are creating a postcolonial counter-narrative, enriching and diversifying history.

People

Project lead: Philippa Sissis